The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  Jenkins extended his tongue, worried his upper lip. He said, “Say, do me a favor? Just turn the bolt on that door and tug the shade down. Won’t be any business this hour anyhow. Thanks. You know, Ben, this ain’t Clay County or Hamblen County neither, but there’s still folks up here think this ought to be a free country. You come on back a minute.”

  The girl wore a loose-fitting African robe and a pair of leather sandals. Her hair was in a natural, a tight cap of black curls. She set three plates of food on the card table. The men did not speak to her or she to them. She left the room.

  The smaller of the two men, whose name was Charles Mbora, forked okra into his mouth, chewed meticulously, swallowed. “Soul food,” he announced. “Honkie got no soul. Honkie eats dead food, has dead white skin and a dead soul inside him. Dead heart and dead soul. You know how he stays on his feet?”

  Howard Simmons nodded. “Steals our soul.”

  “Sucks it like a vampire. Our blood and our heart and our soul. They trying to kill us now, you believe it, brother, they got the gas ovens built and ready. What the honkie don’t know is kill us and he dies. He lives on us, brother. We die and he starves. No blood left to suck, no heart to suck, no soul to suck, and the honkie, he plainly starves to death.”

  The third man, black as coal, fat as Buddha, said nothing. He had not said a word in Simmons’ presence, and Simmons had been with him and Mbora for three hours, first in the coffee shop on Atlantic Boulevard and now on the fifth floor of a rat-infested tenement in the heart of the Newark ghetto. Soul food, he thought. The day they closed the deal on the house, he gave Esther an order: no black-eyed peas, no okra, no chitlings, no mountain oysters, and for the love of God no collard greens. Colored greens, that’s what they ought to be called. “No nigger food,” he told her, watching her wince at the word. “And I say that because that’s what it is. Three hundred years our people ate that garbage because it was what was left. Everybody knew it was only fit for niggers. Mountain oysters—those are pig’s testicles, and it says something about a man if he’ll eat that kind of thing. Nigger food. You know what I want? I want my children to grow up not knowing what nigger food tastes like.”

  Now, he thought, it was soul food. It was black people’s food and you were supposed to be proud you were black. He knew they needed it, needed this pride, and walking these murderous streets and seeing the homes and smelling the stench of the hallways—God, the stench of the hallways—well, they were welcome to whatever pride they could find.

  Not for him. He had all the pride he needed in being Howard Simmons. He had such a soulful pride in his own self that he didn’t need to be proud of being black or eating collard greens or listening to soul music. He listened to Ray Charles and Otis Redding because they were good, damn it, and he listened to Vladimir Horowitz and the Budapest String Quartet for the same reason, and he thought Mahalia Jackson was talented but boring and that Moms Mabley was a dirty old lady, which perhaps made him a prude and a square, but that was the way he was. He had his pride in his home and his yard and his wife and his children and himself and the money he made with his hands and his brains. That was pride enough for him.

  He finished the food on his plate, though. He didn’t like it and never would, but now he ate it and pretended to like it.

  Mbora was saying, “And something else. Two men, and one is sucking the other’s blood, and what has you got? The one is evil and the other is a fool, and the fool deserves the evil that is visited down upon him. The willing victim is as bad as the villain. Those Jews marching off to the gas chamber like sheep to slaughter, and there is niggers who will do the same. They do it now and they’ll do it when it’s not just the sucking of soul and blood but when it’s death. Sheep to slaughter.”

  “Not this sheep,” Simmons said.

  “Everybody says. Everybody.” Mbora stood up, clasped his hands together behind his back, lowered his head, paced like a caged jungle cat. He had protruding eyes that were even more prominent behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike the girl and the silent man, he wore western clothes—a three-button black worsted suit, a button-down shirt, a black knit tie. He was thin and knobby, and he reminded Simmons of someone, but he couldn’t think who.

  “You want to know something? You wonder why I waste my time on you?” A finger quivered under Simmons’ nose. “Because two minutes of talking to you and I know you got a head on you. You got a brain in that head. You walk these streets and so many is so ignorant. From the day they’re born they get told how niggers is dumb, and you tell a child this from the cradle on and they grow up dumb, they grow up with a head they don’t know how to use. So when I meet a soul brother with a mind, I stay with him, I talk to him, I make my words drive that honkie poison out of his pure and beautiful black soul. You understand me, brother?”

  “I understand you.”

  Mbora marched to the window, waved out at the street. “Down there they don’t think. You start with men that think, that think right, that use their heads to think black, then you get them down there to follow. They’d follow like sheep to slaughter or they’d follow like an avenging wave, just so it’s following with no thinking called for.”

  Who the hell was it he reminded Simmons of? He wished he could remember. It was hard to concentrate on the conversation without knowing.

  “We shook this city up, brother. We’ll shake this city up again. And other cities. This whole honkie state, and other states . . .”

  The burnings made sense to Simmons. It was the same way in Detroit. There were buildings no one could save and no one would tear down, and the people who had to live in them were better off burning them, because empty lots were better than those rat-traps.

  But the killing and the looting—no. No, he couldn’t buy it. All it did was leave black bodies bleeding on the ground. All it did was tell the bigots that they were right and black men were animals. Simmons knew what war was and how war worked, and he couldn’t see the point in being in a war unless you stood a chance to win it. Vietnam or Newark, if you weren’t going to win it, you ought to go home.

  “You got a brain, brother.” The finger in his face again. “But a brain by itself is not enough. You need something to go with that fine black brain. You know what you need? The man has said it. You need to go and get yourself some guns.”

  Simmons nodded enthusiastically. Son of a bitch, he thought he didn’t even have to drag the subject into the conversation. Mbora got there all by himself. And in the next instant he knew who it was that Mbora reminded him of. He was, yes, no question, he was a black Woody Allen.

  TWELVE

  The girl’s name was Patricia Novak. She was around twenty-eight, and Giordano gathered that she had been divorced for two or three years. She had two rather uninspiring kids whom Giordano had met when he picked her up at her house. Her parents’ house. She was twenty-eight years old and divorced and she lived with her parents, and that just about said it.

  There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with her. She was just a little taller than Giordano, just a little too heavy in the waist and hips, just a little too broad in the face. A few months of substituting proteins for carbohydrates would cure that. What it wouldn’t cure was the bovine cast to her face. Her features were all right but Giordano knew that the features were the least important part of the face. They were like the jewels in a watch. What made a watch worth several hundred dollars was not the two or three dollars worth of industrial diamonds but the craftsmanship that went into it. In the same way, the beauty in a human face came not from its inborn features but from the personality that came through it. When a girl looked dull and stupid, it was generally because she was a dull and stupid girl.

  “That was really one wonderful meal, Pat,” he told her. “I never would have picked that good a restaurant myself.”

  “I didn’t know if you’d like Italian food,” she said.

  “Oh, you can’t beat it.”

  “That’s about the best place around, ev
erybody says.”

  Then everybody was crazy, Giordano thought. All pasta dishes should be al dente, not overcooked like a mouthful of mush. And the sauces—his mother would put a bottle of ketchup on the table before she trotted out a sauce like that. Well, everybody had always said Neapolitans couldn’t boil water. The restaurant called itself the Breath of Naples, and that was accurate enough. The breath of Naples, he thought, was seventy percent garlic.

  He opened the car door for her, helped her inside, then walked around and got behind the wheel. He wondered how many people held car doors for her. Stop it, he told himself. You don’t just have to get through this evening. You have to string her for maybe a week, because she works in the place and knows the answers to questions you haven’t even thought up yet. And if you’re going to spend as much as a week fucking this side of beef, you have to sell yourself on her. Seducing her may not be a challenge, but you have to seduce yourself, and the first step is to stop taking mental potshots at the kid.

  He started the engine but left the transmission in Park. “I’ll tell you, Pat. I was thinking about a movie.”

  “Oh, that’s swell, Jordan.”

  Jordan Lewis, that was the name he’d given her. Very obvious and amateur, but he had one particular mental block—whenever he used aliases, he forgot them. Jordan Lewis he had used frequently in the past; he would at least be apt to remember it.

  “I checked a paper, the movies. There wasn’t too much of a selection.”

  “Every town in Jersey, they’ll have three theaters, and all over the whole state they just have three different movies.”

  “They call it block-booking,” he said. He decided it wasn’t unreasonable for him to know this. He had told her he was an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations. “But the point is, Pat, none of the movies appealed very much. There was one at a drive-in, but I’ll tell you the truth, I hate watching a movie at a drive-in.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I’m the same.”

  “You’ve got the screen way out in front of you and the sound booming next to your ear and it doesn’t seem real. And then all the crazy kids you find at those places.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  He turned to her, a shy look on his face. “Any movie, though, I’ll tell you, Pat, a movie isn’t much of a treat for me. I must see three, four movies a week.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “What else do you do when you’re in a strange town and you don’t know anybody? To me a movie is part of being alone.”

  “I know what you mean. That television set, sometimes when I think of the time a person can sit in front of that box and just stare at it like a moron——”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

  He pulled away from the curb, drove slowly with both hands on the wheel. “What I like, what I really like, is just to talk to somebody. And that’s the rarest thing in the world.”

  “You must meet plenty of people, Jordan.”

  “But how many people do you meet that you can talk to? I mean really talk to. I mean relax and open up and talk.”

  “Look at all the people come into the bank. I know what you mean, it’s the same.”

  She wasn’t a bad kid, he told himself. Not a bad kid at all. The boxes people get into, the binds. She was okay.

  At a traffic light he turned to her. He said, “What I’d like to do, well, I’m afraid to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Well . . .”

  “You can say anything to me.”

  “I feel that,” he said. “I feel that you would understand. But it sounds like—well, what I’d like to do is if we could just go back to where I’m staying and really relax and get to know each other. Jesus, the way that sounds!”

  “But I understand.”

  “Do you?” The light turned. He pulled away, kept his eyes on the road but went on talking to her. “The loneliness, every day another city. I don’t drink, but maybe we could get some wine. My father always said there’s a difference between wine and real drinking.”

  “Oh, there’s no question.”

  “What was that wine we had in the restaurant? I had it before, I can never remember the name.”

  “Chianti.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “We could get some and go back to my place. I know how that sounds but I’ll tell you, I’m not much for parties and nightclubs, I don’t get on that good with strangers. Listen, if this doesn’t sound right to you, just say the word and I’ll never mention it again. So help me.”

  He looked at her again, and suddenly the bovine look was gone, the stolid cast, all gone, and she had turned almost radiant. He wondered briefly if the change was in her face or in his eyes. It hardly mattered.

  Then her hand touched his, a comforting pat, a squeeze. “Most fellows, if a girl agreed, they would take it the wrong way. No, you don’t have to say, I know you’re not like that. I think . . . yes. I don’t care about movies either, Jordan. And I’m like you, and lonely, you don’t have to tell me about lonely. Yes, let’s go to your place, yes, I’d like that.”

  When Murdock pulled into the motel lot Simmons was waiting for him. He opened the door and got inside, and Murdock spun the truck in a neat circle and drove back onto the highway.

  “How’d you do?”

  “Two pieces. Fifty dollars for the two, if you can believe that. Soul brothers stick together. He didn’t make a dime on me.”

  “I got two and paid three times that. More. Ninety for the Ruger and seventy-five for the Smith and Wesson.”

  “Caliber?”

  “The Ruger’s a forty-five. Mean old thing. The S and W’s a thirty-eight, takes the same load as killed that guard.”

  “I got both thirty-eights, but one is chambered for magnum loads, which I believe is what they took out of the teller that was shot.”

  “Lucky it didn’t take her arm off, a magnum shell coming off a thirty-eight frame.”

  “Or take the arm off whoever fired it.”

  “You know it.” They lit cigarettes, and Murdock inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of smoke. “They’ll know it wasn’t the same guns, won’t they?”

  “Uh-huh. Ballistics. They can tell. But they’ll also figure that a pro always gets rid of a gun if he uses it but that he sticks to the same general type of gun. What the colonel calls verisimilitude.”

  “Now what the fuck does that mean, boy?”

  “Means you should wear falsies if you want people to think you’re a girl.”

  “I’ll just bet it says that in the dictionary. Right like that.”

  “Just in the unabridged dictionary.”

  “What I say, you teach a nigger to read and he just don’t know when to quit.”

  “That’s the truth. Rednecks, now, you don’t have that trouble. Never yet heard of one they could teach to read.”

  “Well, now, you just know it’s tough enough getting used to wearing shoes. You should have heard some of the things I said about niggers. And I got three, no, four new jokes I’ll have to tell you.”

  “We’re even. I spent a couple hours agreeing that honkies are the worst thing in the universe.”

  “What the hell’s a honkie?”

  “A redneck.”

  “I’ll be damned, I’m a word I never heard of. What’s it come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know where redneck comes from, for that matter. My neck ain’t red unless I stand in the sun, which I don’t.”

  “As far as that goes, I haven’t nigged in years.”

  “Huh?”

  “I say I haven’t nigged in years, so why do they call me a nigger?”

  “If that don’t beat all.” Murdock laughed, slapped the steering wheel. “Now, that’s funny.”

  “Old joke.”

  “Never heard it. ‘I haven’t nigged in years.’ There’s a drugstore. You want to call Old Rugged or should I?” />
  “I might as well. I have to call my wife, anyway.”

  “What for?”

  “I call her every night. You know, just to see how she is and let her know I’m all right.”

  “Yeah,” Murdock said.

  He parked the truck and waited while Simmons went inside. He looked at his cigarette for a moment, then pitched it out the window. Aloud he said, “Ain’t nobody in this world I’d call.”

  Nobody at all, he thought. Just to call up and talk to, well, there wasn’t anybody. Not that he felt the lack. But still.

  But, he wondered, why did Simmons make a point of saying it? If he was going to call, well, fine, and go ahead and do it, but why say? Or was he just trying to make me feel bad?

  Oh shit, he thought. Think on things too hard and you just went and made yourself crazy. And he looked down on the floor at the two paper bags, each with two guns in it, and thought where they all came from, and the too-hard thoughts went away and he just put his head back and started laughing.

  It was like gambling in one respect. The important quality, the absolute essential, was patience. Hurry up and wait—that was how the Army put it. You had to be able to move fast. You also had to be able to go without moving at all.

  Manso was stretched flat on his back underneath Albert Platt’s black Lincoln. He had remained in that position for well over an hour. First he had crouched beside the fence until the lot attendant delivered the car. Then, with the kid in the car and the engine going and the kid down at the far end of the lot and facing out toward the street, Manso took three running steps and slapped his hands onto the bunched-up tee shirt and vaulted the fence. He landed soft, landed on the balls of his feet, and in seconds he was out of sight behind a car, the tee shirt tucked under his belt.

  Another few minutes and he had found Platt’s car. He knew the model and license number—the colonel’s sister was aces in the research department. The doors were unlocked, the key in the ignition. He considered and quickly rejected the idea of hiding in the back seat. Instead he picked another good moment and let himself into the car long enough to pop the hood latch. He slipped out of sight then, waiting, and when the kid took a moment to duck out of sight around the front of the restaurant, Manso raised the hood and loosened a wire coming out of the distributor.