Parker said, “Lempke, tell us the story.”
Lempke made an awkward gesture, saying, “Billy ought to—”
“You tell it,” Parker said.
Billy laughed brightly and said, “Maybe that’s best. I’ll just sit over here and listen.” There was a kitchen chair against a side wall, far from where Claire was sitting, and this was where Billy settled himself, sitting lumpishly with his legs apart and his hands resting on his thighs.
Lempke said, “It’s coins, Parker. Billy fingers and does the financing, and when it’s done he gives us fifty per cent on the take.”
Parker shook his head. “Bad,” he said.
“Why?”
“There’s never enough profit in those. You hit a coin dealer, he’s got goods worth maybe forty, fifty grand. That’s twenty-five for us. Split three ways, it isn’t enough.”
French said,” I did one of those once, when I was hungry. Me and a fella named Stimson. A coin dealer fingered it, same as here. We followed this other dealer away from one of those conventions they have, hijacked him on the Turnpike. We split a lousy eighteen grand between us, and Stimson got a bullet in his leg.”
“But this isn’t just one dealer,” Lempke said. “This time it’s a whole convention.” He turned to Parker, saying, “You know anything about these coin conventions?”
“No.”
“They’re not a regular convention like doctors or anything like i lint. It’s kind of like a sale. A whole lot of dealers get together, and they rent a hotel ballroom or someplace like that, and set out their stuff over a whole weekend, so the local hobby types can come in and buy.”
Billy said, “The local coin club is host. They arrange for the hotel and the banquet and displays and tours and everything.”
Lempke said, “You get a good-size coin convention, there’s sometimes three million dollars in coins there.”
Parker said, “How do we get at it?”
“Let Billy tell you that.”
Billy leaned forward eagerly, his hands pressing down on his thighs, and said, “The dealers set up Friday morning in the bourse room, and most of them come to town the night before. So there’s a special room set aside, they call it the security room, and everybody checks their stock in there on Thursday night for safekeeping. Maybe three-quarters of the dealers have their stock in the security room Thursday night.”
Lempke said, “Billy’s idea is, we break into the security room late Thursday night, clean it out. He figures close to two million dollars.”
French said, “Our piece is a million.”
“Close to it,” Lempke agreed. “That’s what Billy figures.”
“And he pays us when?”
“As I liquidate the stock,” Billy said, and laughed, saying, “If I had a million dollars, I wouldn’t need to do any of this.”
“I figured it was like that,” said French. He got to his feet. “Nothing against you, Lempke, but I don’t work on IOU’s.”
Lempke said, “Jack, this is rock solid. I know Billy, I can vouch for him.”
Parker said, “Lempke, when did you get out?”
Lempke looked at him in surprise. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“From you. You’re too hungry to be smart.”
“Parker, you got to listen to the rest of this.”
“No, I don’t.” Parker got to his feet, and said to French, “I’ll take a cab with you.”
When they left, Lempke was looking after them with a pleading expression on his face, Billy was smiling in bewilderment at Lempke, and Claire was wearily studying her fingernails.
Four
THEY WALKED six blocks before they found a bar where they could call for a cab. Along the way, they found out there were half a dozen people they knew in common. Because they didn’t know each other yet, they avoided mention of any specific jobs either of them had been on.
As they walked along, French said, “I’m sorry that wasn’t any good. I could use a job. I’m dipping into my stake. You don’t know anything else happening, do you?”
“No,” said Parker. “But I’d like to.”
“If you hear of anything—”
“Sure,” said Parker. “The way to get in touch with me is through a fella named Handy McKay in Presque Isle, Maine.”
“I think I met him once,” said French. “He’s in the business, too, isn’t he?”
“Retired a couple years ago. The two of us got shot up on something that went sour.”
“It takes a smart man to retire,” said French. “My man is Solly Hinkle, San Antonio. Tell him the Frenchman.”
“Right.”
They went into the bar, called a cab, and sat at a booth with drinks till it came. Neither of them was much of a talker, so they sat in silence, hands around their drinks. Three locals at the bar were telling each other about Willie Sutton, deciding he was a genius and they just don’t make them anymore like that these days.
The cab got there about ten minutes later. They got in and French told the driver, “Union Station.” Then, to Parker, “You’ve got to go back to your hotel, don’t you?”
“Right. The Clayborn.”
The cab started up, and Parker sat and tried to decide where to go tomorrow. There were unlikely to be any more planes out tonight, so he’d have to stay over.
If French was traveling by train, he must be really close to the edge of his cash. He’d said he was going into his stake, but he hadn’t said how long that had been going on. To be that tight, and yet to turn down a job that fast, meant a good man. Parker filed the contact’s name and address in his head for some other time.
French got out at Union Station, and from there it was a quick drive up Illinois Street to the Clayborn. There shouldn’t have been any messages at the desk, and there weren’t any, but he checked anyway. He thought about calling Handy, but he didn’t have anything to say to him yet, and if Handy had any other kind of news it could wait till morning.
Parker went on up to his room. He neither undressed nor turned on a light, but went over in the dark to his bed and lay down there on his back, looking up into the darkness.
There was no place he wanted to go, but he knew he wouldn’t be getting to sleep until he’d made some sort of decision about tomorrow. He thought about going out again, looking for a woman, but at one o’clock on a Wednesday night in Indianapolis the prospects were probably very bad.
He thought about all the towns he knew, all the places he’d ever been, from Miami to Seattle, from San Diego to New York, and there was nothing good to be said about any of them.
He lay looking up into the darkness at the ceiling, and his nerves were starting to jump again.
Five
WHOEVER WAS knocking at the door wouldn’t quit, so after a while Parker got up and went to see who was there. He didn’t turn the light on this time, because he didn’t care about whoever this was.
Claire. She said, “I thought you were asleep. At the desk, they said you were in.” She was looking at the darkness of the room behind him, and registering the fact that he was dressed.
Parker said, “Billy sent you to sex me back in. Tell him forget it.”
She shook her head. “Billy doesn’t send me anywhere,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong idea about us.”
“I don’t have any ideas about you. Go home.”
But she wouldn’t. Pressing one hand against the door, she said, “Do you really think Billy’s the one behind this idea? Do you really think he’s got the brains to know what time it is?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter whose idea it is,” he said. “It’s still sour.”
“It doesn’t have to be, I know it doesn’t. Let me in, let me talk to you.”
“There’s no point,” he said, but he felt his restlessness winning out over logic. Not urging him to get back into Billy Lebatard’s harebrained scheme, but just to spend some time with,this woman; listen to her, bed her, fill an hour or so till he could sleep
.
She sensed his indecision, but maybe not its cause, and pressed the point, leaning inward toward him, palm still pressed flat against the door. “Just let me talk to you for five minutes. Five minutes.”
Abruptly he shrugged and stepped back and said, “Come in then.”
She went past him into the darkened room, and he shut the door. In the dark her disembodied voice said, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”
“I can concentrate this way,” he said. “You just talk, I’ll listen.”
“I can’t see anything,” she complained.
He walked past her, knowing where the bed was, and stretched out on it. “You don’t have to see,” he said. “Just talk.”
“Why do you have to pressure me like this?”
“You came here,” he reminded her.
In the next silence he could hear her taking out her pride and looking at it and deciding it wasn’t worth the gesture and putting it away in a box till some time when she could tie the score. When next she spoke, her voice was level and flat and emotionless: “Where do I find a chair?”
“To your left, and back.”
She found it without stumbling into anything, and waited till she was seated before lighting a match and putting it to a cigarette. Looking at her in the small yellow light, he felt the first surge of specific desire for this individual woman. He looked up at the ceiling and watched the shadows there until the match went out.
She said, “It’s nine days from now, in this hotel.”
“They must have scraped out Lempke’s skull, up there in the big house.”
“Why?”
“He’s forgotten everything he ever knew. You and Lebatard, you’re amateurs, but Lempke should know.”
“What should he know?”
“Number one, you don’t meet in the town where you’re going to make the hit. Number two, you don’t stay in the hotel where you’re going to make the hit. Number three, you don’t take a job on consignment; we’re in the wrong business to take your Billy to court if he doesn’t pay.”
“You can kill him.”
“How much does that make me?”
“I mean, Billy won’t try to cheat you because he’s afraid of you. All of you. He knows if he doesn’t pay, you’ll kill him.”
There was nothing to say to that, so Parker simply closed his eyes and waited.
After a minute, she said, “I know there’s a certain amount of risk in this, but there’s risk in it every time, isn’t there?”
When she kept waiting for an answer, he said, “Don’t put those silences in, I’ll go to sleep.”
“Well, isn’t there risk all the time?”
“You’re here to tell me, not ask me.”
“All right. My husband was a pilot with Transocean. Billy is his sister’s husband’s brother. When my husband was killed, Billy started hanging around. I told him no, but he keeps saying he just wants to be my friend, he wants to help me. I need a lot of money, and I told him so, and he said he’d get it for me.”
Parker said, “You told him you wouldn’t give, but you would sell.”
“If he wants to take it that way, it isn’t my fault. He said he wanted to help, and I knew what I needed, and I told him. He’s done this kind of thing before, you know. Hire people to steal from other coin dealers. Except for the really rare ones, coins arc absolutely untraceable.”
“You need more than he can get from a simple dealer heist?”
“I need seventy thousand dollars.”
“Seventy grand. That’s friendship.”
“What I do is my business.”
“Right. And what I don’t do is mine.”
There was a pause, and then she said, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry. I know how it sounds, but I do what I have to do.”
“Take off your clothes.”
The silence this time had sharp edges on it, and so did her voice when she said, “That’s your price?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll get someone else.”
He let her reach the door, and then he said, “Your line was,’ I do what I have to do.’ But that’s a lie, you wear your pride like it’d keep the cold out. What you mean is, you despise Lebatard and don’t care what you do to him.”
She shut the door again, bringing back the darkness. She said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Another rule,” he said. “Don’t work with anyone you can’t trust or don’t respect.”
“You have too many rules,” she said.
“I haven’t been inside. Lempke has.”
“What would you have done if I had taken my clothes off?”
“Taken you to bed and left in the morning.”
“Maybe it isn’t pride,” she said. “Maybe I’m just smart.”
Parker laughed and sat up. “No more life story,” he said.
“Tell me the caper.”
Six
“THIS WILL be the bourse room,” she said. “There’ll be tables around the walls and two ranks of tables down the middle of the room, with one aisle going all the way around.”
They were in the ballroom on the hotel mezzanine. It hadn’t been used for anything tonight, and was open and empty, a long rectangular room with tall windows down at the far left end. A bluish-white streetlight gleamed in on the bare wood floor, making the place look like a basketball court in off-season. The wall opposite the doors was covered from end to end in maroon plush drapes, and the wall at the right bore a large historical mural, heavy with Indians.
“Down here,” she said, and led the way to the left. Down in the far corner, near the windows, was a small inconspicuous door in the long wall. Opening it, she said, “This will be the security room. Where the dealers will keep everything Thursday night.”
It was a small bare room, empty except for a cream telephone sitting on the floor. There was one window, through which the streetlight angularly shone. Looking out, Parker saw the hotel marquee down to his left, and the wide empty street outside.
“There should be a hundred dealers at this one,” Claire said. “Seventy or eighty will get in Thursday night and check their stock in here.”
“When’s the convention over?”
“Sunday night.”
“What do they do with their goods Friday and Saturday?”
She pointed at the ballroom. “They leave everything on the tables. There’s Pinkerton guards here the whole time. There’ll be one in this room, too.”
There was a closed door in the wall opposite the window. Parker unlocked it, opened it slowly, saw there was no one in sight on the mezzanine, and stepped through to look around.
The mezzanine was constructed around a large rectangular opening overlooking the lobby, surrounded by a wide walkway with ornamental railing. To Parker’s left was the double-doored ballroom entrance he and Claire had used. To the right, one-quarter around the walkway, were the elevators, with the staircase just beyond.
Parker stepped back into the room—a sign over the door said LAKE ROOM—relocked the door, and went over to take down the extension number of the telephone on the floor: one-nine-five. Then he turned to Claire, saying, “What else?”
“We’ll go back outside.”
They went through the ballroom again and back out to the walkway. Pointing across it, to the left of the elevators, she said, “The display room will be over there. Tables with special displays of sets of coins and paper money. But there’s no use taking any of that, most of it is too readily identifiable.”
Parker said, “So what we want is over here. Ballroom—what did you call it?”
“Bourse room.”
“Right. Bourse room and security room.” Parker looked thoughtfully around and said, “What about the Pinkerton men? Where are they stationed?”
“I don’t know. We’d have to wait and see.” Parker grimaced. “All right, let’s go back upstairs.”
“Will you do it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve still got que
stions.”
“You ought to ask Billy, he knows more than I do.”
“We’ll see. Come on.”
They walked around to the elevator, where she said, “You don’t like it very much, do you?”
He didn’t, but he said, “I don’t see it yet, that’s all. Maybe I’ll never see it, I don’t know.”
The elevator came and they got aboard. She said, “But there’s all that money there, all in one place.”
“How much stock do these guys carry? A suitcase each?”
“Oh, at least,” she said. “Most of them will have more than that. Two or three carrying cases.”
The elevator reached seven. They walked down the hall, Parker saying, “Figure two suitcases a man. Full of coins. They’ll be heavy, figure a rough guess, maybe fifty pounds each.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“A hundred fifty suitcases,” he said, unlocking his door. They went in and he switched on the ceiling light.
Claire said, in a small voice, “Seventy-five hundred pounds.”
“Round it off,” Parker said. “Four tons. It’s your idea to get three or four guys together and heist four tons of luggage.”
“There’s a way,” she said, trying to sound as though she believed it. “There’s a way to do anything, if you look for it.”
“Sing that,” he said.
“Damn it,” she flared, “you’re supposed to be the professional, why don’t you think of something?”
“I have.” He went over to the bed and stretched out on his back, hands behind his head.
“You have? What?”
“We stay away from the security room. We hit the bourse room late Saturday night.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe there’s no job in it at all, but if there is one it’s in the bourse room Saturday night.”
“But everything’s all unpacked then,” she said.
“Good. We can pick and choose, just take the best stuff.”
She was half-smiling, half-doubtful, hopeful, uncertain. She said, “Do you really suppose it can be done that way?”
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