The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  Laos had been the third war for Roger Elliott Cross. He led a platoon at Salerno and Anzio, fought up and down numbered hills in Korea. When they put together Special Forces, he was one of the first Regular Army types selected, one of the first to see action in Southeast Asia. The men under his command trained tribesmen and villagers, launched hit-and-run missions in Laos and Vietnam.

  And he had always liked it. It was hell, as Sherman had said, but at the same time it was a football game for adults, with the sweet harsh joy of contact and the sense of being utterly alive that exists only in the midst of death. Someday, he knew, it would be time to retire. There was the house in Tarrytown, the house he grew up in. There was his sister Helen and her husband Walter. There was enough money to live comfortably on, between the family estate and his own savings and a full colonel’s retirement pay. But retirement could wait; he was too busy being alive.

  Then one day one of his men took a bullet in the throat just as he pulled the pin of a grenade, and the grenade dribbled across the ground toward Colonel Roger Cross. He woke up in a bed with his legs on fire and when he reached down for them they weren’t there. Both gone, one just above the knee, the other halfway up the thigh.

  He surprised the hell out of his doctors. They told him he was lucky to be alive, prepared for bitter denial, and he agreed with them completely. He was still the same man as he had been before. A man lived in his mind, and as long as his mind was unimpaired, he remained alive.

  He did the exercises. He mended quickly. They flew him from Tokyo to San Francisco to New York, and by the time the jet set down at Kennedy, he was anxious only to see Helen and Walter and make a new life with the two of them. He was confident he would not be a burden. A wheelchair gave one a good deal of mobility and he had learned to use his well. He could amuse himself, he was accustomed to solitude.

  Helen met him at the airport, her eyes red from crying. “Now you’re being ridiculous,” he scolded her. “The important thing is being alive. They say I’m too tough to kill, they broke three hacksaw blades amputating. Pull yourself together, will you? And where in hell is that husband of yours?”

  She dissolved completely then, turned and fled from him. He started to wheel the chair in pursuit, then decided to let her be. She came back a few moments later, face washed and hair neat, and told him quickly and concisely what had happened.

  Walter was dead. Three weeks ago, while Cross was learning how to operate a wheelchair, Walter Tremont updated his will, paid the delinquent premiums on his insurance policies, and hanged himself in his office.

  “I couldn’t write you,” she said. “I wrote letters, but I couldn’t mail them, I had to wait until you were here. When they cut him down his face was all purple and his tongue was huge and black. Oh, Roger——”

  A lengthy suicide letter explained everything. Walter Tremont, who had never in his life bet two dollars on a horse race, had lost almost a quarter of a million dollars in Canadian mining stock. He got into it a little at a time, and at first he did well and then he began doing badly, and he plunged deeper and deeper in an effort to get even, and by the time he put the rope around his neck, he had gone through his money and his wife’s inheritance and the funds he held in trust for the colonel.

  “But he could have gotten back on his feet,” Cross said. “He must have known I would have understood. He was a young man, he could have found a way to work things out.”

  “Roger, he was broken. I . . . the last few weeks I must have made his life miserable. He looked awful, really awful. I kept telling him to see a doctor. I think it would have ruined him physically one way or another even if he hadn’t done what he did. Roger, they killed him.”

  “They?”

  The stockbrokers, she told him. Or confidence men, because that was what they really were. A lawyer had gone through Tremont’s papers and reconstructed the situation for her. Cross went over it himself and saw that she was right, they had killed him, they had fastened the rope around his neck. It was a boiler room swindle, the main operation based in Toronto with a pair of outside men who had spent months winning Walter Tremont’s friendship and setting him up step by step for the kill.

  Cross hired detectives. He learned the names of the men who had set up Tremont along with the names of the crew back home in Toronto. He spent time and money assembling folders of evidence, and when he was done, he called in a federal district attorney and showed him what he had.

  “He says we haven’t got a leg to stand on,” he told Helen later. “And then the damned fool blushed like a schoolgirl when he remembered that you’re not supposed to use that sort of metaphor in front of a paraplegic. Do schoolgirls still blush? I don’t suppose they do. There’s no case against those men. They don’t seem to have broken any laws. All ten commandments, perhaps, but no laws. God damn it, if I did have a leg to stand on, if I had both legs——”

  He spent his days reading military theory and history and his nights drinking until sleep came. One day he closed a volume of Clausewitz and shoved the book impatiently aside. Clausewitz didn’t tell you how to reach the men who couldn’t be reached, the law-abiding thieves who stole a man’s money and ruined a man’s life.

  Or did he? Was it, after all, not a legal problem but a military one, an exercise in strategy and tactics?

  He wrote to Washington. He asked the Pentagon for the addresses of men who had served with him in Laos and had since returned to civilian life. The request spent some time going through channels, but eventually he received a list with twenty-three names on it.

  He spent two days going over the list and remembering each of the men, assessing strengths and weaknesses, calculating probable motives and desires. At first he planned to get in touch with all of the men, and when he thought about this later on, he guessed that perhaps a dozen of the twenty-three would have responded favorably.

  But instead he had picked five men. Four were former enlisted men, only one a commissioned officer. He called those five, and all of them came to Tarrytown, and all of them reacted as he had expected them to react.

  And they were good men. It was all the same jungle, he thought, in Laos or the States. It was the same kind of jungle and the same kind of war, and it took the same kind of men to fight it. Men like Manso and Murdock and Simmons and Giordano and Dehn.

  Helen returned at six. He asked her if she had found anything, and she said it could wait until after dinner. He argued and she won. He ate a thick slab of roast beef without tasting it. Then, with coffee, she told him what she had learned.

  Back in his office he sent four telegrams. To Murdock and Simmons and Giordano and Dehn.

  THREE

  Simmons was mowing the front lawn when the telegram came. He liked to keep the grass just about an inch and a half high, so he had adjusted the blades to that height and mowed the whole lawn, front and back, every Tuesday and Friday evening before dinner. He could have done this at any time of the day, since he worked at home and set his own hours, but he liked to be out there walking behind that big rotary mower when the neighbors drove home from work. Other garden work and home repairs he did when the occasion arose. It was very important, though, that his neighbors could watch him cut that damn grass.

  “Howard! Howard!” He cut the mower’s engine, walked over to the front door. Esther was framed in the doorway, the light of the setting sun glinting off the lenses of her glasses.

  “A telegram,” she said.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” he said.

  “I had them read it out to me over the phone.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It used to be that they always delivered telegrams in person. Now all it is is a message over the telephone.”

  He would have liked to shout at her, but this was something he had never done since the day they met. Three years, one child and another coming, and he had never once shouted at her. But it was so maddening the way she fed information in bite-sized pieces, and with the reflected sunlight obscuring her eyes
he couldn’t read her face.

  He approached her, took her arm. “Bad news?”

  “Well, no. But bad for me. I wrote it down.” She turned and he followed her into the house. “Another collection coming on the market, so I suppose that’s another business trip. Here.”

  The message read: OPPORTUNITY NEGOTIATE PURCHASE HIGH TICKET EUROPEAN COLLECTION STRONG NINETEENTH CENTURY CLASSICS RECOMMEND THURSDAY ARRIVAL. It was signed ROGER CROSS.

  “I suppose you’re going?”

  “If you like food on the table, then I’m going.”

  “I like food on the table. I like my husband home, too. Where is it you’re going?”

  “Cross is in New York,” he said. “I’ll have to meet him there, but most likely the collection will be somewhere halfway across the country, and I’ll be chasing after it.”

  “Why aren’t there ever any collections here in Detroit? You’d think there wasn’t a stamp collector in the entire state of Michigan, but I just suppose when they think on selling they call in some dealer from Arizona or New Mexico. Didn’t this Roger Cross send you a telegram before?”

  He nodded. “Sort of a vest-pocket dealer. He’ll run into things like this that aren’t in his line, you see, and if I make a deal I’ll pay him a commission.”

  “I just hope you won’t be gone long as last time. Two months and you’re going to be a daddy again, you know. Be nice if you were around for it.”

  He came up behind her, put his arms around her, clasped his hands over her abdomen. “Nice little baby,” he said.

  “Oh, now.”

  His hands moved upward to her large breasts. “Lucky baby. What nice lunch bags, I declare.”

  She giggled, delighted, then shook herself free. “How you carry on, Howard Simmons. Now I’ve got dinner to fix, and you have a lawn to mow. You don’t want them saying you don’t keep up your property, do you?”

  “And aren’t those my property, Queen Esther?”

  “Go on, now,” she said.

  After dinner he called Northwest Orient and made a reservation for Wednesday night. He bathed little Martin and played with him until bedtime, then sat with Esther in front of the color television set. He couldn’t keep his mind on the programs, and after a while he didn’t even try. He thought about the telegram from the colonel and wondered what it would turn out to be.

  He found himself wondering if the men liked him. The colonel did, he knew, but sometimes he felt a little ill at ease with the other men, as if his presence made them indefinably uncomfortable. He knew he was inclined to be overly sensitive, it was the way he was, and of course you couldn’t get away from the class division even in civilian life. He had been an officer, a captain, and they were enlisted men, and that in its own way created a gulf at least as great as the other element that separated him from them.

  The first time, in Canada, he had been particularly aware of the distance between himself and Dehn and Giordano and Murdock and Manso. More with Murdock than the others, perhaps, but it was there with all of them. Still, he had to admit that it had never gotten in the way. The five of them worked together on an equal level, planned the operation and carried it through, and when they were all together with the colonel in the big house in Tarrytown, the pie was carved into equal shares, a shade over fifty thousand in cash money for each of them.

  “I want to thank you all,” the colonel had said. “You’ll all go back to your own separate lives now. I don’t suppose we’ll see each other much, if at all. But if any of you ever needs anything, anything at all——”

  Then a sort of embarrassed pause, until Giordano said what all of them had been thinking. “Sir, I’ll say one thing. This past month makes the first time I’ve felt like myself since I took off that uniform, sir.”

  Nods and echoes. And Ben Murdock, elaborately casual, saying, “You know, this kind of thing, we could do it again sometime.”

  The six of them were up all night talking about it. All over the country there were dirty men with dirty money, men the law could never get close to, but once you took their money away, it turned clean. Hard, tough men—but after fun and games in Laos you weren’t so easily impressed by tough men in civvies. As the colonel said, it was all the same jungle, and jungle fighting was what they were trained for.

  The colonel helped plan out their lives for them. They needed covers, he told them. They needed lives that would account for their income, needed ways to bury their money and turn dirty money into clean money.

  For Simmons, the answer was a simple one. All his life, ever since his second-grade teacher gave him some stamps from letters from her mother in Hungary, he had spent spare time working on his stamp collection. It wasn’t much of a collection because he had never earned huge money, but it was perfectly organized and beautifully mounted. And ever since he decided against reenlisting and went back to Detroit and found Esther and married her, ever since then he’d had that one big dream. Sooner or later, damn it, he was going to be a stamp dealer.

  An independent dealer. No shop, no boss, no customers to meet face to face, even. Ads in the magazines and all his business done by mail, and Lord, if he only had the capital, he could do it right. None of the penny-ante stuff, no fooling with new issues and other promotional items. Just buying and selling good solid collectible stamps.

  It was the perfect cover. The fifty thousand from Operation Stockpile was enough to buy the house and the stamp stock and keep the business running a long time. As it turned out, the business went into the black by the fourth month; last year he had netted better than twelve thousand dollars just selling stamps. And the two operations they had carried out since then were gravy. It was a cinch to hide the proceeds, paying cash for expensive stamps for his own collection. His personal collection was quite an improvement on that handful of Hungarian stamps that started him off twenty-seven years ago. He wondered what Esther would say if she knew how much it was worth.

  And later, in bed, after he had successfully convinced her that lovemaking would not constitute an invasion of the baby-to-be’s privacy, he listened to her measured breathing and wished he didn’t have to keep this part of his life secret from her. It was for her own good, he knew. She worried enough if he got on a plane, and if she had the slightest idea what he really did on those business trips, it would tear her up, no question about it.

  Still, though, there were times when he ached to tell her, if only for the fun of checking out her reaction. He decided that she just wouldn’t believe it, any more than his mail-order stamp customers would believe that Howard Simmons was a Negro.

  FOUR

  It was clear hot weather in Joplin, so Dehn took the day off. He generally took off three or four days a week, not counting Saturdays and Sundays. If the weather was good, he liked to spend his time on a golf course. If it wasn’t, he sure as hell didn’t want to go around ringing doorbells. But once or twice a week the weather would be sufficiently unremarkable as to make golf unappealing and doorbell-ringing bearable, and on those days he would walk the streets of whatever city he happened to be in and try to sell some poor clown an encyclopedia.

  He was pretty good at it because he got such a kick out of people. He traveled for a good encyclopedia, one of the two or three best, and he didn’t feel at all dishonest about conning people into buying it. When you came right down to it, nobody really needed an encyclopedia. A staggering number of people lived full and rewarding lives without ever being in the same house with an encyclopedia. On the other hand, though, if a guy was going to waste his money on something, he could do a lot worse. It certainly didn’t hurt you to have an encyclopedia in the house. It wasn’t like selling liquor or cigarettes or automobiles. Nobody ever got killed by an encyclopedia.

  Because he got a kick out of people, and because he regarded both his work and his customers with the ideal mixture of sincerity and contempt, Dehn was a pretty decent salesman. He averaged close to a sale a week, and with his net on a sale pegged at $168.50 he earned not t
oo much less money than he spent. He had figured that he ought to pay taxes on around ten thou a year. He made up the difference now and then by sending in an order and paying for it himself, generally with a money order drawn under a fictitious name. He had the sets delivered to orphanages and old folks’ homes as anonymous gifts, with the commissions that came back to him from the Chicago office boosting his income to a sufficiently realistic figure.

  That day he got out to the golf course early. He hung around the clubhouse until three other loners accumulated, then played eighteen holes with them as a foursome. He hooked most of his tee shots, but his short game was on and he came in with an 82, which was a little better than he averaged on that course.

  The weather was just as good that afternoon. He was going to play around again after lunch but changed his mind and put his clubs in the trunk. He drove out Grand Avenue into one of the newer developments and went around punching doorbells. The first fifteen houses he didn’t even get a foot in the door. The sixteenth was a bottle-blonde housewife with her kids in school and her husband at the plant, and after two and a half hours in her bedroom he could have sold her six encyclopedias and a second-hand Edsel, but he didn’t even try. He had done that once and it made him feel too much like a pimp.

  He drove back to his motel and read Hydroz to Jerem until it was time to go out for dinner. He ate downtown, caught a movie, stopped at a drugstore for an ice cream soda, and got back to the motel around nine thirty. The telegram was waiting at the desk for him.

  Dehn generally worked a new town for three or four weeks, and whenever he moved, he sent the colonel his address. He had mailed a great many postcards to Tarrytown since the last operation. Now, as the clerk passed him the telegram, his heart pounded faster. In his room he read: REGRET TO INFORM YOU AUNT HARRIET DIED PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP LAST NIGHT FUNERAL THURSDAY. ROGER.