The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  The Specialists

  Lawrence Block

  Contents

  BEFORE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  DURING

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AFTER

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  BEFORE

  Albert Platt looked better with clothes on. He had his suits made by an East Side tailor, his shoes by a London bootmaker, and his ties by a countess. With his clothes on and his hair combed and his jowls shaved and cologne, he looked like a successful hoodlum. Naked, he looked like a gorilla.

  He was naked now. He sat on the edge of a high-backed Victorian wing chair in the living room of his suite at the Desert Palms. Glossy black hairs curled on his abdomen and chest. Sweat beaded on his forehead and under his arms.

  In his right hand he held a .38-caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel. The gun was heavy, and Platt eased the load by resting his elbow on the arm of the chair. The muzzle of the gun just touched the center of the girl’s forehead.

  The girl was also naked, which was all she had in common with Platt. She was half his age and half his weight, a long-bodied redhead, trim of breasts and bottom and thighs. She knelt at Platt’s feet like a supplicant at the rail.

  “Two hundred bucks,” Platt said. “Fifteen minutes, half an hour, two bills isn’t bad, right? You just be a good girl and you can go buy yourself a Cadillac.”

  The girl heard the words but couldn’t hold onto them. Nothing existed for her now but the mouth of the revolver. She had begun to perform as he had demanded, and the gun must have been lodged between the cushion and frame of the chair, because all at once it was in his hand and its cold metal mouth was touching her forehead and his voice was telling her that she would barely feel it at all, just one bright streak of pain and it would be over before she knew it.

  “A gun goes off,” Platt said. “In your forehead or in your mouth, your pretty mouth. A bang is a bang.”

  The girl was performing what journalists call an unnatural act. She had always wondered why it was so labeled, because it had never seemed anything other than natural to her. Until now.

  “Like a baby with a bottle,” Platt said. “Oh, be a good baby, that’s a good baby. You don’t want to die, baby. That’s right, baby. You don’t want to die, all that beautiful money, two hundred beautiful dollars, nobody wants to die, baby, you don’t want to die.”

  An important man, they had told her downstairs. Donna, kid, this is an important gennulman, you want to treat him right. A banker, a very well-connected gennulman, his first trip to Vegas in three years, Donna, you want to make him real happy.

  Oh, yes, she thought, yes, I want to make him happy. You better believe I want to make him happy. Oh, God, I want to get out of here. Two hundred beautiful dollars, fuck his beautiful dollars, I need it like a hole in the head. Oh, Jesus, a hole in the head—

  An image flashed in her mind, a newspaper halftone, all dots, her face, with one huge black dot in the center of her forehead. A two-column cut with a headline over it and a few paragraphs below. Donna Mackenzie model and dancer found in the desert persons unknown funeral private.

  “Oh,” Platt said. “Oh. Oh. Ah, baby, baby, baby.”

  Don’t run and retch, don’t, don’t. Just stay, just wait, and God make the gun go away, make it go away, make him be fair, his game and his rules, and God, God make him be fair.

  “Sorry, baby,” Platt said.

  God, you cheated—

  The trigger squeaked back. An eternal instant, a world of forever black.

  The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

  Laughter, roaring, rolling, dying down. His footsteps across the deep carpet to the bedroom. The slam of the bedroom door.

  She stood up. She spat on the carpet. She looked at the stain. There was a sudden rush of vertigo, as if the carpet were miles away. Her head swam, her knees buckled. She almost fell.

  She pulled her dress over her head, grabbed up her underwear and stockings. She put on one shoe and couldn’t find the other. She was looking around for it when she heard his laugh again from the other side of the bedroom door.

  She kicked off the one shoe. The hell with the shoes. Her purse was on the lamp table and she snatched it with her free hand. The hell with the shoes, they were cheap shoes, she could buy other shoes. She had two hundred dollars in her purse, two hundred beautiful dollars that she would love to change into dimes and shove up his ass. Or make it pennies, the son of a bitch, the dirty son of a bitch.

  She ran for the door.

  ONE

  Manso was shaving when someone started pounding on the door. He had a towel around his middle and a face half full of lather. He called out, “Yeah, just a minute,” and brought the razor into position for another stroke.

  The pounding didn’t stop, and over it he heard Donna’s voice. He was about to tell her to wait, but something in her tone changed his mind. He went to the door, still carrying the razor, still wearing the towel and the lather.

  “I was just shaving,” he told her. “I didn’t expect . . . what’s the matter?”

  He had never seen her like this, face pale and drawn, eyes crazed, desperate. He started to say something, stopped himself, turned to lock the door. When he turned around again, she was climbing out of her dress.

  He said, “Baby, I don’t——” and her eyes flashed at him.

  “Don’t ever call me baby.”

  “Huh?”

  She was suddenly gasping for breath. He stared at her. He had been in Vegas for three weeks and sleeping with her for two and he had never seen her like this. She wasn’t a girl who got like this. She was bright eyes and laughter at the shows and cool reserve at the dice tables and friendly clean fire in bed. She was never hysteria; it didn’t fit.

  She said, “I took a shower, I used a mouthwash. I can’t get clean. I took a shower so hot it burned. Eddie, please. I can’t talk, I just can’t. The shower was hot but I’m cold cold cold and I have to be warm and I have to be clean.”

  He waited.

  “Bed, please. Take me to bed. Could you do that? Could you just take me to bed? Could you?”

  Afterward he lit cigarettes and called down for ice. He made drinks and took them into the bedroom. She went through hers in a hurry and he built her a second.

  She said, “I never exactly told you this, but I’m sort of like a hooker.”

  “I guessed.”

  “How? I come on cheap?”

  “No amateur could be so skilled.”

  “I’m serious. How?”

  “Well, two and two. Vegas, and this place, and no job or husband. And you said a dancer, and your legs, your muscles are different from a dancer’s.”

  “I didn’t think you knew because you never let on. It didn’t bother you?”

  “Sure it did. It made me impotent.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m sorry——”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry, and maybe I need jokes. But didn’t you feel anything?”

  “Maybe flattered. To be on the free list. You want to tell me about it, Donna?”

 
“Huh?”

  “Because you didn’t just wake up tonight and remember the nuns telling you that bad girls go to hell when they die. If you don’t want to talk about it, fine, but I get the feeling you do.”

  “Go to hell. Oh, I didn’t mean you, that you should, I was just being an echo. What you said. Dying and going to hell. Did you ever almost die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever have somebody point a gun at you and think you were going to die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  He very nearly said, I got killed, but it wasn’t the time. “It was in the Army, there were lots of times, but either I shot first or something got me out of it.”

  “They said he was a banker. Very important, a banker, but he didn’t talk like one or act like one. God knows a banker can be as kinky as anybody else, but he was a banker like I’m a boy. He was——”

  “Start over.”

  “What I thought first was he must be like a numbers banker. Or a bookmaker, you know, a major bookmaker that they might call him a banker so he’s not just another bookie.”

  “Start over.”

  She turned to him. Her eyes worked into focus. “I’m all right now,” she told him.

  “I know. Want to start over?”

  “Okay.”

  He didn’t interrupt. The hysteria had passed and she was able to tell it straight enough now, and he let her do it her way and just lay there on the double bed nursing his drink and taking it all in. The colonel was right, he found himself thinking. You had to draw a line through mankind, a wavy line but a line, and on one side you had Good and on the other side you had Evil. There was good and bad in everyone, sure, and every shitheel was some mother’s son, and it was all well and good to know this, but when push came to shove, it was just words; there was Good and Evil with no shades of gray and Judgment Day came seven times a week.

  When she ran out of words, Manso stood up. “Stay right here,” he said. “You know where the liquor is. Stay here.”

  “Eddie, he’s got a gun. He’ll kill you!”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “This is going to kill the image, but all I’m going to do is finish shaving. Because I want to finish shaving, and because I need a few minutes to think about this. Just stay here.”

  He ran water, spread fresh lather. He was 28, and the face in the mirror looked a little older. This was unusual; for the past three years he had looked 23 almost all the time. But every once in a while his face put on five years. Generally it was heart-shaped and cherubic, topped by a cap of black curls and dimpled on either side of his mouth. Now the planes of his face were harder, and the eyes had turned, and the general impression was no longer one of a moderator of a daytime television show.

  He took his time shaving, rinsed, splashed with cold water and after-shave lotion. He thought about beating Platt up, even killing him. Of course there was always the chance that Donna was building fantasies in her head. He could have told her in advance that it was just an act he went through with hookers, say, and Donna later got carried away with the realism of the whole thing.

  But what he kept coming back to was this business of Platt insisting he was a banker. A hood who owns banks?

  He went back to the bedroom. She was nursing a new drink and smoking another cigarette. “What bank?”

  “Huh?”

  “Platt. What’s his bank? You said he was talking about it.”

  “He was a hood, Eddie. Believe me. You live in Vegas and you get to know what a hood is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are hoods you’ll meet who talk like bankers, but I never met a banker who——”

  “Yeah. Did he mention the bank?”

  “I think so. He said he had three of them.”

  “Three banks?”

  “No, I guess it was two.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t one?”

  “No, I’m positive it was two. And he said New Jersey, I remember that much.”

  “You remember the city?”

  “Two cities, one for each bank.”

  “You remember them?” She didn’t. “Hackensack, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton? Camden, uh, New Brunswick, East Orange, uh, Plainfield——”

  “I think I’d remember if I heard. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know. You’d remember if you heard. Jesus, I think I just named every town there is in Jersey. Princeton? Secaucus?”

  “No.” She thought for a moment. “One of them had Commerce in its name.”

  “That narrows it down.”

  “I guess it doesn’t. You’re not . . . you act as though I ought to remember.”

  “Sorry.”

  “He was the same way. The one with Commerce, that was the one he thought I ought to recognize. He asked me what the hell was wrong with me, didn’t I ever listen to a radio? I said yes and he said maybe it wasn’t on yet. I don’t——”

  Eddie was out of bed and on his way to the television set. They watched the last reel of the late show and caught fifteen minutes of news. Nothing. What the hell was Platt talking about?

  He fed her drinks until the sun came up, then tucked her in and went downstairs to the casino. There was one crap table open, with three shills trying to feign interest in it. He joined them and felt at least as bored as they were. After half an hour he cashed out a few dollars ahead and had breakfast.

  When the New York papers came, he went to work on them. The story was on the first page of the second section of the Times. The afternoon before, five masked bandits winged a teller and shot a guard dead and took the Passaic (N.J.) Bank of Commerce and Industry for a sum estimated at slightly in excess of $350,000.

  Manso read the brief story twice through, cut it out, read it again, carried it to a phone booth.

  “I want to call Tarrytown, New York,” he told the operator. “Person-to-person to Colonel Roger Cross.” He reached into his pocket, came up with a few quarters and a nickel. “And reverse the charges,” he said.

  She asked his name and number. “Eddie Manso,” he said, and gave the number, which she read back to him. “Make that Corporal Manso,” he added. “Corporal Edward J. Manso.”

  TWO

  “Extremely interesting,” the colonel said. “It might be worthwhile to know just what you’ve encountered here, Eddie. Now just let me review my thoughts for a moment.” His eyes scanned the sheet of notes he had taken during the conversation. His mind caught at ideas, played with them. “Yes,” he said at length. “Yes. Extremely interesting. You know, Eddie, we haven’t seen you in quite some time. Helen said as much just the other morning. It might be pleasant for all of us if you could arrange a trip east. The day after tomorrow? That’s a Thursday, I doubt you’d have any trouble booking a flight. Good, we’ll expect you.”

  The colonel pushed away from his desk, wheeled himself over to the west window. He looked down at the highway and across it to the river below. From that height and distance the Hudson appeared to be as clean and pure as it had been when he had learned to swim in it half a century ago.

  But few things seemed as pure after close examination. In April his sister Helen had given him a particularly thoughtful gift on the occasion of his fifty-eighth birthday, a pair of high-quality German binoculars. He enjoyed watching birds through them, but he had learned not to use them when he looked out at the river.

  Twenty-five miles to the north on that same river stood West Point, where a sportswriter was the first to name him The Old Rugged Cross. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to recapture the feeling, playing fullback out of the old single-wing formation, hitting the line hard, blocking for the halfbacks, taking the long snap from center and angling a punt deep for the coffin corner. His right foot ached pleasantly with the memory and he grinned hugely at the brief pain, thinking how utterly the mind and the body live at the mercy of one another.

  “What’s so funny?”

&nbs
p; He turned to smile at his sister. She had a tall drink in her hand and he took it from her. “Time-traveling,” he explained. “All of a sudden my foot hurt. It forgot it was somewhere in Laos.”

  “Do you want a pill? I’ll——”

  “No, it was just a memory twinge. I was remembering what it was like to kick a football. This”—he raised his glass—“is a superb idea. Aren’t you having one?”

  “In a little while. Did the phone ring? I was in the yard.”

  “I took it. It was Eddie Manso.”

  “Is he in town?”

  “No. He’s in Las Vegas, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, dear. And he’s gambled himself into poverty, I suppose. Shall we wire him a few dollars?”

  “Not that at all. He’s run into something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Something rather interesting.”

  Helen’s face had clouded briefly when he mentioned his legs, eased when he spoke of Manso. Now as she seated herself in one of the leather chairs she was positively beaming.

  “I told Eddie he might come see us on Thursday,” he said.

  “How marvelous.”

  “Yes. I might be having the rest of the boys as well. It depends on several things. What time is it?”

  “Just past four.”

  “Do you feel up to some reconnaissance? An hour or so in the library, I should think. You may not get much because I don’t know exactly what you would want to look for.”

  “Just what did Eddie tell you?”

  “My notes are on the desk. Bring them over and I’ll brief you.”

  While she was out he stayed in his chair at the window, alternately gazing out over the Hudson and rereading Churchill’s Marlborough. He had just gotten to the account of the duke’s first major victory at Blenheim, and he reviewed Marlborough’s strategy and thought how little the basic principles of warfare had changed over the ages. The same general pattern of thrusts and parries worked as well for Marlborough as it had six centuries earlier for William at Hastings. Communications changed, weaponry evolved, armies grew even larger and more complex in structure, but the more things changed, the more they remained as they had always been.