The Handle

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I want to go out there, as a customer.”

  Yancy seemed surprised. “Really? You want to show your face?”

  “Why not?”

  “Beats me. It's your face.”

  It wasn't. It was a face a plastic surgeon had given him once.* But that wasn't the point. “I want to go there,” he said. “I'll need a stake, say six hundred.”

  “Done.”

  “And a woman. Someone who looks right and knows how to use a camera. With a camera hidden on her someplace, purse or whatever. When I tell her take a picture, she takes a picture.”

  Yancy nodded. “There's no reason we can't come up with somebody,” he said.

  “Tonight.”

  Yancy smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, leaning on the words. Parker picked out the four or five sheets of paper he'd found useful, and said, “You can take the rest of this stuff away again.”

  “We like to be thorough,” Yancy said.

  “So do I,” said Parker.

  * * *

  *The Man with the Getaway Face.

  3

  Parker walked around the cab and opened the other door, and the little blonde danced out in a swirl of petticoats and narrow knees and tanned thighs above the stocking tops. She stood patting her waist and studying her purse as Parker shut the door again and the cab drove away.

  “To tell you the truth,” the blonde said, as Parker took her elbow and they started down the pier, “to tell you the truth, I'm scared to death of water. Terrified. Petrified.”

  She talked a lot. She'd talked a lot in the cab, and before that she'd talked a lot in his motel room while he was getting ready. She was narrow, narrow all over, with narrow head and narrow waist and narrow legs, and where she wasn't exactly narrow she was at least slender. Her nose was narrow, flanked by prominent cheekbones, and her eyes were large and brown and innocent and liquid, like the eyes of a Walt Disney fawn. She said her name was Crystal, which had to be a lie, and it was impossible she was as brainless as she seemed.

  But she looked right for the part, so this time Outfit thoroughness seemed to be working out. If she knew how to operate the camera hidden in her purse, and if she wouldn't do anything stupid to give the game away, fine. In any case, she talked too much.

  “I suppose,” she said, as they walked down the pier, “it's one of those childhood things? A trauma? Where maybe somebody threw me in the water to teach me to swim and I was too young or something? I don't remember anything like that, but maybe that's significant because I wouldn't remember it. That makes sense, doesn't it?”

  Parker had discovered the way to handle her. When she paused, he grunted. She turned his grunts into whatever words she wanted to hear, and went on with her monologue again.

  “All I know, anyway,” she said after his grunt, “all I know for sure is I'm absolutely terrified if I even think about water. So I wouldn't come along on a date like this with just anybody, Jerry, let me tell you. This means you're something special, Jerry, that I'd even consent to come out with you like this tonight.”

  The last two sentences, with the name Jerry in them, had been spoken for the benefit of the stocky guy in the sport shirt and yachting cap at the end of the pier, sitting on a barrel and smoking a cigarette and watching Parker and the girl with complete lack of interest.

  Parker stopped and said to the guy, “The boat for Cockaigne leave from here?”

  “Where's that?” said the guy.

  Parker took from his pocket the small card he'd been given this evening by Yancy. It had written on it in ink, “COCKAIGNE” and “OK” and an illegible signature. Parker handed this to the guy in the yachting cap, who squinted at in in the dim light — two twenty-five watt bulbs glowed high up on a pole at the end of the pier — and then said, “Okay. We leave in five minutes. Go on down the stairs there.”

  Parker led the way. The stairs were narrow and steep, and the girl didn't have any attention left over for talk until they were down on the deck of the cruiser. Then she said, not loud, “I'm not kidding, I'm really scared. I just hope I don't upchuck, that's all I hope.”

  Most of the deck was roofed over, and in that area were four rows of chairs, four chairs to each row. Two couples were sitting in the rear row, chatting together quietly. Parker led the way up to the front row and he and the girl sat down there.

  Just ahead, three steps led up to a higher level, where the controls were. A guy was sitting on the rail there, a younger version of the stocky type upstairs. He too had a cigarette going, and didn't seem to give a damn about much of anything.

  The girl said, “Can you feel the boat move? Feel it? We aren't even going anywhere yet, and it's moving. Can you swim?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can't. Because of my fear, you know? Are you a good swimmer, a real good swimmer?”

  “Good enough.”

  “If this boat sinks or anything, you won't leave me, will you? You'll help me get to shore.”

  If the boat sank, Parker knew this girl would be hysterical and would drown with her anyone she could get her hands on. If the boat sank, Parker would get as far from her as he could as fast as possible. But he said, “I'll help you. Don't worry about it.”

  “I can't stop myself, I do worry, that's all. I just can't stop myself.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “This is stupid, I know it's stupid, but would you mind if I held your hand? Just while we're on the boat, you know? Just for like moral support.”

  There was nothing else to do. Parker gave her his left hand, and she put into it a hand cold and damp and trembling. She wasn't inventing the fear, it was real. The talk, he supposed, was a way to siphon off some of the nervousness. Maybe most of the time she wasn't a non-stop talker after all.

  That was the way the Outfit worked, though. Have a job that means going for a boat ride, get somebody afraid of water. Brilliant.

  Four more people came down into the boat, and settled in the row behind Parker and the girl. A minute later the stocky guy came down, cast off the lines, and his younger brother up front started the engine. The girl squeezed Parker's hand, and now she stopped talking. She didn't say a word all the way out to the island.

  At night Cockaigne was a lot more impressive. It was just a dark bulk in the water from the landward side, but circling around it the boat abruptly came upon lights and color and the sounds of music.

  Spotlights played on the main building and the piers and the surrounding jungle and the water. Colored lights lined both piers just below the water line, making the ocean here look green and red and yellow. Loudspeakers played lush string ensemble music witha fidelity that was surprisingly good for an outdoor system. On the paths and stone benches among the rock gardens between piers and casino sat or strolled a dozen or more of Baron's customers, dark-suited men and bright-gowned women carrying iced drinks and talking together. A score of small boats were docked at the two piers, and at least as many larger boats were anchored offshore, many of them adding their own bright lights and music and laughter.

  “My God,” said the girl. She seemed to forget for a second her fear of water, but her hand didn't loosen its grip.

  There was a reserved space for this shuttle boat at the shoreward end of the lefthand pier, and once they were settled in it the girl hurried ahead of Parker, scrambling up the steps as though the boat were sinking right now. She waited for him on top of the pier, smiling sheepishly.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, taking his hand in a more relaxed way now. “I tried to keep it in.”

  “It's all right,” he said, although it wasn't. But he'd have to make the effort to keep her in a good mood so she'd do good work.

  The ground sloped upward from the pier to the blank-faced brick casino, looking strong and blind up there with its white pillars and its lack of window. The rock gardens through which they had to walk to get to the casino had an intricate, fussy, Japanese look about them, full of varicolored odd-shaped stones and tiny gnarled bushes. The stone benches here and ther
e were gray, weathered, like Aztec ruins. Farther along, knotted jungle growth filled the slope up behind the casino, framing it in dark green.

  As they moved away from the pier, Parker said, his voice low, “Start taking pictures.”

  “I already took two,” she said. “One coming in and one on the pier.”

  He was surprised. “Good,” he said.

  “Don't worry, I'll do my job.”

  He believed her.

  Tall broad glass doors led into the casino. Outside the night had a tropical heat and mugginess to it, but inside there was the coolness and dryness of air conditioning.

  The glass doors had led them into a large high-ceilinged anteroom. The walls were a pale cream color, the far ceiling iced with hanging glass chandeliers, the floor a checkerboard of huge black and white tile squares. Renaissance paintings hung on the walls, and dark wood antique chairs and love seats were spotted here and there along the sides of the room.

  Broad arched open doorways led off on three sides, each with an identification in black discreet block letters on the wall above the arch. To the left, the dining room. Straight ahead, what were gently termed lounges. To the right, the casino proper.

  Parker said, “Food now or later?”

  “Later. When my nerves calm down.”

  “This way, then.”

  Parker and the girl went through the archway on the right, into the casino.

  The ceiling here was lower, and modernistic; acoustical tile spaced with inset fluorescent light fixtures. The walls were pool-table green, done in a fabric wallpaper. The floor was carpeted in a darker green. Gaming tables were set at random throughout the room, facing this way and that in a careful, tasteful simulation of disorder. To the left, behind gleaming mahogany and a brass wire mesh, stood the cashiers, in black sleevebands and green eyes hades.

  Parker bought two hundred dollars” worth of chips, gave the girl a hundred, and spent some time moving around the room. He won a little at a crap table, betting against the point, lost a little on the red at roulette, won and lost and won again at chemin de fer.

  There were no slot machines, only gaming tables of every kind. Parker and the girl stood at a poker table till a chair became free, and then the girl sat down and played half a dozen hands. She won a large pot with jacks full, squealed with joy, kissed the cards, clutched handfuls of chips to her breast. She called attention to herself, but in a good way, in a way that called no attention to the man with her. She played the sexy, naive, gold-digging, wide-eyed blonde to the hilt, and the looks she got were compounds of amusement and lust.

  After an hour they moved on to the dining room, where the food was viciously expensive but superb. The dining room was huge, but broken up by vine-grown trellises and flower-filled planters. A fountain in the middle of the room plashed quietly, and the waiters moved with silent speed.

  Nowhere did he see a way to the second floor, no unexplained doors anywhere. There had to be more to the building, downstairs as well as up, but he couldn't yet figure out the internal arrangement. Exits from the dining room led only to the entrance hall, to the lounges, and to the kitchen. From the casino there was an exit only to the entrance hall, and the men's lounge was also a cul-de-sac, opening only onto the entrance hall. The girl told him the same was true of the women's lounge.

  Back in the casino, Parker left the girl at a crap table while he roamed around the room. The only answer was a hidden door, and this was the room most likely to contain it. Why Baron would have installed a secret door to the second floor when obviously the place had to have a way to get upstairs Parker couldn't guess, but it was clear that Baron had done so.

  It took him fifteen minutes to find. A thin vertical line in the baseboard at one point along the rear wall was the give-away. The door sat so flush with the wall that no line or break in the wallpaper could be seen from more than a foot away, but down at the baseboard the joining wasn't quite so perfect.

  Parker didn't stop to inspect the door; it would have to be under observation. In the next fifteen minutes he strolled slowly by it six times, studying it, finding no way to open it from this side. It would have to be controlled electrically from somewhere else, probably the cashier's wicket.

  Five minutes later he'd taken the girl away from the crap table and she'd had three shots of the section of wall with the door in it. Then they left the building and took the slate path around the right to the cockpit at the rear. The path was lined by thick hedges, separating them from a narrow path of lawn and then the dense jungle.

  On the way around, she said, “I've never seen a cockfight. Do you mind if I take a couple pictures of it, just for myself?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The cockpit was in a small, round, brick, windowless building with a green conical roof directly behind the casino. It looked like a truncated silo. Old-fashioned carriage lamps hung all around the building, and more lamps of the same style on black metal poles flanked the path.

  There was an admission charge to the cockpit: five dollars a head. Inside, steeply slanted tiers of seats formed a circle around the smallish dirt area in the middle. It looked like an operating amphitheater, or a miniature bull ring.

  A fight was already in progress, the birds” handlers calling to them in Spanish, the commissioners walking around and around the tiers calling out the odds and taking bets. There were two closed metal exit doors in addition to the door Parker had just come in.

  The tiers were less than half full, and most of the customers looked like people seeing their first cockfight and neither understanding nor liking anything of what they saw. Here and there aficionados shouted encouragement and jargon in English or Spanish.

  There was no money here. This was a gimmick, a touch of exotica to bring the customers in. It looked cheap and fly-by-night, a marginal operation. The money was all in the other building, in the casino.

  Parker spent a few minutes looking the place over and then left. The girl came along, but reluctantly, staring back into the pit all the time they were climbing to the doorway. Outside, she held Parker's arm and leaned against him. Breathily she said, “I never knew … I didn't know there was anything like that.” Her eyes gleamed in the lamplight, her feet seemed unsteady on the path as they walked back around toward the casino entrance again.

  She said, “Wasn't it incredible? Wasn't it fascinating?”

  “Mm.”

  “I never saw anything… I could stay there all night, look at me, I'm trembling all over. Where were they from, are they from Mexico?”

  “Yes.”

  “The men, too? The ones talking to them?”

  “Handlers. Trainers. Baron imports them with their birds.”

  “I've never been to Mexico,” she said, thoughtfully. And then, as they were entering the main building again, “Do they have them in Mexico a lot? Cockfights?”

  “Here and there.”

  They went inside and he left her at one of the tables again, with instructions to get some pictures of the cashier's wicket. He went away to the roulette table nearest the cashier and played off and on while watching the routine behind the wire, where the cash went, who did what, what keys opened the wood and wire door in the far corner.

  After half an hour he gathered up the girl again and they went back outside. This time they followed the path around the other way, down between the main building and the living quarters, past the cockpit on the other side, and up between the storage sheds. The path was just dirt here, hemmed in by jungle, scantily lit by bare bulbs hanging by wires from tree branches.

  Just past the storage sheds a heavy-set man in a dark suit stepped out on the path in front of them. “Sorry, friends,” he said. “No guests past this point.”

  Parker took from his pocket a ten dollar bill. “A little walk and privacy,” he said, “that's all we're looking for.” He stepped forward with his hand out, and the bill disappeared.

  The heavy-set man said, “Don't go in none of the cottages, though. I can
't do nothing about that. You go in there, you get us all in trouble.”

  “We'll keep out.”

  The heavy-set man moved back into the darkness and Parker and the girl moved on.

  The path now detoured around the power plant, a bulky humming building in semidarkness. Around on the other side the ground sloped downward, and now the path, just barely lit by widely spaced dim bulbs, meandered and curved back and forth, passing one after another of the cottages. The cottages were flimsy pastel clapboard structures of the tourist-cabin type, built up on concrete block supports to keep the damp away, and with narrow porches equipped with hammocks. Just enough land had been cleared for each cottage, so the jungle hemmed it in on all sides and the path skirted the porch steps. All the cottages were dark and seemed empty.

  At the sixth cottage the path ended. “Wait here,” said Parker. He took a pencil flash from his pocket and tried groping through the underbrush toward the water, but it was impossible. He could catch occasional glimpses of the ocean out there, glinting in the moonlight, but the undergrowth was too dank and thick and interwoven for any sort of passage short of chopping one's way with a machete.

  Parker said, “All right.” He put the pencil flash away again. “Let's go back.”

  “You want any pictures?”

  “Of what? There's nothing here.”

  They retraced their steps, this time seeing nothing of the heavy-set man, and when they got back to the main building Parker turned and led the way past the living quarters, down a concrete walk behind the living quarters to the two boathouses.

  Two of the three young men who'd come out in the small boat yesterday were sitting on webbed lawn chairs by one of the boathouses, dressed the same way as before. One of them got up and came over to Parker and the girl, saying, “Off limits. You want to go the other way.”

  “Sorry,” said Parker. He stood there looking at the boathouses and the water. “Nice place here,” he said.