The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  He had his knife. They’d let him put his shoes on, and never noticed the little knife taped to the inner sole. He had it in his hand now. The footsteps were coming closer, and any second now there would be the sound of a key turning in the padlock, and the door would creak open, and Platt would come in, with or without a gun, with or without a bodyguard, and Platt was going to get a knife in his neck come hell or high water.

  All day long the door had tempted him. It was wood, and thin, and its hinges were on the inside where he could get at them. All in all, it presented about as much of an obstacle as a fence to a bird. Even without the knife he could have gone through it in no time at all.

  But what good would that do? If he busted out, the whole house would know about it. If he managed to take the damn thing off its hinges, he was still far from home free. The guards obviously had orders not to let him off the property, and it wouldn’t be all that much of a cinch to break out of the place single-o.

  So he had stayed where he was and he spent the day going through hell. Platt said he’d delivered his message to Helen Tremont, and if he did, the colonel would certainly be able to figure out which end was up, so there would be a rescue team coming in sooner or later. The question was just how long he could hold out. Sooner or later Platt would find someone who had known Florence Goddam Mannheim, and would prove conclusively that Eddie didn’t exist.

  He couldn’t wait for Platt to let him know he’d got the news. He couldn’t wait at all, as far as that went. Next time he had a shot at Platt, he would take it. If he got lucky, he’d find a way out afterward. If not, well, at least he’d take Platt along with him.

  “Eddie? You down here, boy?”

  “Ben!”

  Footsteps coming close, and he lowered the knife and pressed up against the door. “Ben?”

  A low chuckle from Murdock. “Well, I’ve seen prisons, you old son, but this here is positively escape-proof. Why, this makes Alcatraz look like a day camp for poor crippled kids.”

  “Open the door, will you?”

  “Open it? Why, Eddie, there’s a big old lock on it! A wooden door with an actual padlock. Now, how in the world can I go and open something like that?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t be nasty. I’m ’shamed of you, stuck behind a little old wooden door.” Manso heard the sound of metal scraping, and then the door was drawn open. Murdock was holding the padlock in his hand. Its mountings hung from it. “Didn’t even have to pick it apart,” he announced. “Silly thing came right up out of the wood. Frank and Howard is upstairs. We did the five outside and there was one on the first floor that I almost fell over and still managed to cut him ’fore he knew anybody was in the house.”

  “Where’s Lou? And what about Platt?”

  “Platt’s upstairs, or leastwise I think it’s him in a room with a woman. We decided on finding you first and lettin’ you be in on it if you wanted. Lou, he got shot in the laig. We took that bank, boy. You miss the best part of things, don’t you? Lou’s okay. And the team voted you a full share, even if you didn’t get to play in the World Series.” His voice lost the lightness. “You look sicker than a snake. You feeling poorly?”

  “I caught a beating last night. I think it was last night. But if you already took the bank—what the hell time is it now?”

  Murdock laughed. “You don’t want to get all involved in details,” he said. “Best to let your mind roll on a bit. You come along with me now, boy, and we’ll go upstairs and kill Platt and get the hell out of here.

  She was wearing a black bra and nothing else at all. She sat at her dressing table brushing her dark hair. Platt lay on the bed watching her. Anger mixed within him with embryonic lust.

  “Get over here,” he said, “and get naked.”

  She turned and put the hairbrush down. “Aren’t I naked enough, Albert?”

  “Get outa the bra.”

  She reached behind her back to unhook the bra strap. He examined her critically. “They’re starting to sag,” he said. “Well, nothing lasts, does it? You get old and you sag a little.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Get in bed.”

  She got in bed, but it was no good, nothing happened. After a few minutes he pushed her violently aside and sat up. She looked at him, eyes wide in surprise. This had not happened before.

  “Well,” she said, trying it on. “You get old and you sag a little, don’t you?”

  She expected an outburst, perhaps a slap. It didn’t come. Instead he said, “You know the bank in New Cornwall? It got robbed.”

  “Was that the one? I heard something on the news.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what? Did you have any money in it?”

  He looked at her. “Oh, a little,” he said.

  “So you’re insured, aren’t you?”

  He considered, then shrugged. “Right.”

  She got to her feet. He rolled over quickly, caught her arm, and pulled her down on the bed again. “You tell me the truth,” he snapped. “You and Eddie. What happened?”

  “It drives you crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t like not knowing what’s going on. Did he screw you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What shit is this?”

  “Oh, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.”

  “You were pretty goddamned positive this morning.”

  “I guess I was at that. Albert, you’re hurting me. Let go of my arm. I said let go.”

  “Bitch.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “To the kid? It depends.”

  “He’s not your son, you know.”

  “What makes you so damn sure?”

  “He told me.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “No, he told me. He’s a plant. Some of your friends in Chicago sent him to check up on you.”

  He sat up suddenly, his face white. Was somebody setting up some kind of power play? Kostakis had said he was getting a lot of static from South Jersey types who wanted in on the Trenton action. Maybe somebody on the council was setting up for a redistribution of wealth in Bergen County. And if they were getting ready for something like that, they were certainly maneuvering nicely. The shit with the bank was going to have cops on his neck night and day for weeks. And Buddy Rice was out of the way, and a Chicago plant was living in his house and screwing or not screwing his wife, depending on whether or not she was telling the truth—

  That was the trouble. It all depended on whether or not she was telling the truth.

  Because if you read it the other way, then the kid downstairs was his long-lost, goddamned son and the aggravation in New Cornwall was an accident, some punks who didn’t know whose bank they were robbing, and all it meant was a few weeks of headaches for his lawyers.

  But how in hell was he supposed to know what was true and what wasn’t?

  To himself as much as to her he said, “If I decide he’s my kid, every time I look at him, I’m gonna wonder. All the time I’ll be wondering. It’s no good. Either he’s lying or else his mother was crazy and gave him a crazy story. That dose I had, maybe it was just a dose, maybe all along I was sterile. Yeah, that’s it. I could never have kids, so he couldn’t be a kid of mine. Right?”

  “If you say so, Albert.”

  “I say so.”

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  “Well, I’ll let him sweat until morning. And I’ll let a couple of the boys open him up a little first. If there’s anything in this Chicago thing.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Even if I did, which I don’t, he could have been lying to you, kid.”

  “Oh.”

  He stretched out on the bed, pleased that things were working out, that the indecisiveness was gone. He reached out a hand and caught hold of one of her breasts. He squeezed sharply and she let out a bark of surprise.

  “You got to expect sag with tits this size,” he said. “Get over
here. Open your legs, I want some.”

  “If you’ll let me watch.”

  “Huh?”

  “When you kill him.”

  “He gets to you, don’t he?”

  “Not what you think. Will you let me? I’ll do it the way you always want.”

  He grinned and took her head in his hands. “You’ll get a front-row seat,” he told her.

  He settled himself, closed his eyes, stroked her dark hair with his hands. “Oh, you bitch,” he said softly, reverently. “Oh, you crazy, classy, screwed-up, delicious bitch. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Then the door flew open and Manso came in with a gun.

  AFTER

  In the morning they spent long, lazy hours in bed. An hour or two past noon they would put on bathing suits and walk from their cabin to the beach twenty feet from their door. She never stayed in the water for any length of time. The Caribbean was a bright electric blue, always warm and always clear, with a clean sand bottom. He could swim in it for hours, and sometimes did. She would go in with him and paddle around for a few minutes. Then she would go ashore and lie down on their blanket under the sun. Like him, she tanned readily and did not burn, and within a week she was brown.

  At night after dinner they would usually stick around the lodge for a couple of hours. The native bartender did clever things with rum, and the owner, an Alsatian Jew with one blue eye and one brown eye, would join them at their table and trade lies with them.

  Then a midnight swim, and lovemaking, and sleep.

  She said, “I wish we could stay here forever.”

  “Nothing’s forever.”

  “I know.”

  “And the secret is not to stay any one place too long. That’s one of the secrets.”

  “And the other is never come back, because no place is ever as good the second time around.”

  “How did you know? Oh, that’s right, I made this speech before, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look good as a blonde.”

  “I’ll have to get to a beauty parlor. The roots are starting to show.”

  “I didn’t notice. The blonde hair and the tan—I don’t think your own mother would recognize you.”

  “Well, we can’t test that out, can we?”

  “No, I’m afraid we can’t.” He started to say something else, then changed direction. “I called the airport. I booked us on a Trans-Carib flight Thursday to Miami. Then from there we fly Delta. We could have had a through flight Wednesday on Pan Am, but the Trans-Carib’s a better line. And this way we have an extra day.”

  “I’m glad of that. Will I like Phoenix?”

  “I like it. And you can keep the tan year-round out there.”

  “Will you . . . still want me in Phoenix?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, I figured there were other girls there.”

  “Nothing serious.”

  “Because you and I have no strings. I’m alive, that’s enough. If you see something you want——”

  “We’ll just keep on keeping on, huh?”

  “Because what you said—nothing’s forever.”

  Later: “I wonder where they all are, what they’re doing.”

  “The colonel’s reading something. His Bible or some military history. Helen’s probably baking. The others? Howard was going to spend a couple of days in New York. There were some stamp auctions he wanted to go to. Frank is on the road somewhere, I don’t know where. Ben’s probably in the drunk tank of some jail or other. He generally goes on a bender afterwards and drinks up all his money.”

  “How can anybody drink up fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Ben would try, but he doesn’t have to. If he took all his cash he’d get himself in all kinds of trouble. He generally takes a thousand or two. He keeps five hundred bucks for getaway money and blows the rest. What he doesn’t take, the colonel invests for him. Ben must be worth, oh, a quarter of a million.”

  “You would never guess it.”

  “He doesn’t act it. He doesn’t even think about it, which is why he manages to stay out of trouble. You see, that’s the whole thing, you have to create a life for yourself that you feel comfortable in. Like we could spend absolutely all our time traveling and living it up, but then life would just be something in between the jobs, and it’s harder to live that way. Same with Ben. When he runs out of dough, he’ll get a job somewhere. And live like a bum until the colonel gives him a call.”

  “And Eddie? He’s in Europe?”

  He nodded. “Monte Carlo, I think. He wants to stay away from the stateside gambling areas, at least for the time being. He’s clean as far as the police are concerned, but he figures it might be good to let the gambling types have some time to forget about Platt and his wife. You want to go in for a minute before we go back to the cabin?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll just take a dip, then. It seems to be doing my leg some good.”

  She sat on the beach and watched him bobbing in the waves. She lit a cigarette, then poked the burnt match into the sand.

  She would not see her children again, or her parents. Perhaps not ever, and certainly not for many years.

  She thought that there must be something wrong with her. Because she had loved the children, and she had cared for her mother and father, and now she was never going to see them again and she didn’t seem to care at all. It seemed unnatural, and she thought that there must be something wrong with her.

  She was tan, she was blonde, she glowed with health and vitality. She was eating like a horse and still losing weight, slimming down nicely. And her face, when she caught sight of it in a mirror, looked back at her radiant with the joy of being alive and in love.

  He didn’t want to get married. Well, neither did she, because he was right and nothing was forever. Sooner or later he would probably want to be rid of her. He denied this now, but she expected it would happen sooner or later. But by then she would be trained in a new life role, and she wouldn’t go back to New Jersey and the police would never find her.

  According to the papers, she was presumed dead. A hostage, kidnapped and presumed dead. Well, she thought, so be it. Patricia Novak, rest in peace. Patricia Crosby, welcome to the club.

  Giordano was emerging from the surf. He walked easily, hardly favoring the leg at all. She looked at him in the moonlight and her blood quickened, and she ran across the sand to meet him.

  THE END

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  My novel The Specialists was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal Books. Some years later, James Cahill published a first hardcover edition of the book and requested that I furnish an introduction. Here’s what I found to say about the book:

  I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m most often identified as the creator of series characters. My two active series, concerning a bookselling burglar named Rhodenbarr and a sober drunk named Scudder, are the ones people are most likely to know about. Readers with a wider range may be familiar as well with a series of seven novels about an insomniac named Tanner, and another series of four novels about a horny kid named Harrison.

  A relative handful will have followed the adventures in short-story form of two other gents, an attorney called Ehrengraf and a killer named Keller. But that’s about as far as it goes. Hardly anybody, asked to name all of my series, would come up with The Specialists.

  A fat lot they know. As far as I’m concerned, The Specialists is unequivocally a series novel. As it happens, the series is only one book long. But I figure it’s a series just the same.

  What on earth is he talking about, Maude?

  Easy, there. I can explain.

  In the spring of 1966 I moved into a big old house on a small old lot smack in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey. I set up an office for myself on the third floor. I had a massive old desk, and the movers couldn’t get the thing up the last flight of stairs. It wouldn’t fit. Most desks of that vintage disassemble,
but not this sucker. They had to cut the back legs off it. I propped up the back of the desk with two short stacks of paperback novels, plopped a typewriter on top of it, and went to work.

  Three and a half years later, when we moved to a place in the country, I left the desk right there, and I left the books to keep it from tilting. By that time the desk didn’t owe me a dime, because I’d sat at it and written a whole slew of books. I’d already written the first Tanner book in Racine, Wisconsin, but I wrote the other six in New Brunswick, along with After the First Death and Such Men Are Dangerous and more pseudonymous work than I’ll admit to at the moment. (I wrote No Score, the first Chip Harrison novel, in that house but not on that desk. I moved downstairs to the first floor and wrote it on the breakfast-room table. I can’t remember why.)

  I also wrote The Specialists at that desk. My then-agent (and still-friend) Henry Morrison suggested I might try to come up with a series, and he liked the idea of a group of guys working together in the tried-and-true manner of The League of Gentlemen. I hadn’t read the book in question, but I got the idea. I wrote a couple of chapters and an outline and pitched the idea as a series to an editor at (I think) Dell Publishing. Whoever she was and wherever she was, she thought the outline sounded good, and I went home to my desk to finish the first book.

  And I did, and you in turn have read it . . . unless you’re one of those people who read the afterword first and then read the book. If you’re of a more conventional temperament, you may have noticed how very much a part of a series it is. I did all the series things, did them with considerable calculation. I dropped in tantalizing little references to past adventures, figuring we’d hear more about them later on. I gave the characters back stories I could build on and play off of in future books. I did all kinds of things along those lines because it was quite clear to me that I wasn’t writing a novel, I was writing the first installment of a series. My deal with Dell (or whoever it was), when we finalized it, would be for three books, and who knew how many I’d wind up writing? My guys could go on having adventures until their gruff old colonel grew himself a new leg. Hell, I could write about these bozos forever!