The Black Ice Score p-1

by Richard Stark

  When they went back down to the first floor, they kept up the act. In the half-hour they spent downstairs they set the two time bombs and planted them in places where they would be least likely to start fires. They were set to go off two minutes apart.

  Finally, Parker said, “Thank you, Mr Gonor. It’s all been very helpful to me.”

  “Thank you,” Gonor said. “I’m glad it has been.” He sounded exactly like a man trying not to show boredom.

  They left the building together, Gonor carefully locking the front door, and walked up to Park Avenue, where Gonor waved and said, “There’s a cab.”

  “I’ll take the next one,” Parker said.

  Gonor looked at him in surprise. “Aren’t you coming back with me?”

  “There’s no need to.”

  “We’d assumed” Gonor was at a loss. “We thought you’d be coming back.”

  “There’s nothing more to say,” Parker said. “They know what to do, they know how to do it.”

  The cab Gonor had waved to was waiting beside them. “This is so abrupt,” he said.

  “We’re finished,” Parker said. “All you have to remember for yourself is don’t leave the truck. And if something goes wrong and you have to start again, call me through Handy McKay.”

  “All right,” said Gonor. “Well

  thank you.”

  “That’s all right,” Parker said. He saw another cab coming up Park, and he waved to it. “Good luck,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Gonor suddenly stuck his hand out, as though breaking a promise to himself. “It’s been a pleasure,” he said.

  Parker took his hand. “I hope you make out,” he said.

  They got into their separate cabs. Parker said to the driver, “Winchester Hotel, West Forty-fourth Street.” Then he sat back and watched the world outside the cab window and stopped thinking about Gonor and the diamonds and the museum.

  He thought about Claire. What name was she using? Mrs Carol Bowen. At Herridge House, in Boston. In the last few days, while working out the details of this one, he hadn’t thought of Claire at all, but suddenly his mind was full of her.

  He could take the air shuttle; he could be with her in less than two hours.

  At the hotel, he paused by the desk to tell them to get his bill ready. Then he went upstairs and into his room, and number one was there again, standing by the window watching the drizzle. The ex-colonist, the one who’d been going through Parker’s suitcase way back at the beginning of this.

  His two friends weren’t around. In their place he held a Colt automatic casually in his right hand as though he knew how to use it but was sure it wouldn’t be necessary.

  Parker said, “What now?”

  “I thought we could have a talk,” he said.

  Parker remembered the three names in Hoskins’ notebook. “Which one are you?” he said. “Daask?”

  He seemed surprised. “You know the names? Oh, from Hoskins, of course. No, I’m Marten, Aaron Marten.”

  “All right, Marten,” Parker said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “We could talk about Gonor,” Marten said. “When will the robbery take place? Where are the diamonds now? Where will he take them after the robbery?”

  Parker shook his head. “You’ve got to know better,” he said.

  Marten seemed unruffled. “You don’t want to talk about that? Very well. Would you care to talk about Mrs Carol Bowen instead? Who is no longer at Herridge House in Boston, Massachusetts?”

  Three

  1

  Claire’s head hurt. That’s what woke her up, the pounding of it behind her forehead, up behind her eyes. A real killer of a headache, so that her first conscious thought was I must have drunk too much. But then through the pain came more consciousness, and awareness, and memory, and she thought, I didn’t drink anything yesterday. That made her open her eyes, and she saw she was in a place she’d never been before.

  She wasn’t frightened at first, just bewildered. Continuing to lie there on her side, head cradled by the pillow, covers pulled up around her neck, she looked at the slice of room she could see, the gray wall and the brown kitchen chair and the closed old-fashioned-looking door, and she wondered, Where am I?

  Her clothing was on. She suddenly realized that. She was in bed with the covers pulled up, but underneath the covers she was fully dressed. She was wearing everything but shoes.

  She sat up abruptly and looked around, and it was a room she didn’t know, a large bedroom with old furniture in it: the brass double bed she was in, two dressers, a vanity, night tables, and two more brown kitchen chairs. The bedside lamps had pleated pink shades. The windows had white curtains and dark green shades, the shades halfway down. Gray-white daylight poured through the lower half of the windows. Two windows, both along the wall opposite the bed.

  There was no one else in the room. Claire listened, and there was no sound from anywhere in the house.

  Where was she? How had she gotten here?

  It was hard to think with this pounding headache, hard to make sense out of anything. She bent her head and massaged her temples, and that seemed to work a little. She continued to massage gently and tried to think.

  Where had she been last night? Where had she been at all yesterday?

  She’d gone to a beauty parlor yesterday afternoon, downtown on Franklin Street, she remembered that. And then she’d gone looking to buy a fall, but she couldn’t find anything she really liked that matched her hair color. She’d gone back to the hotel, hoping Parker would be there today it was nine days today or at least a message from him, but there had been nothing. She hadn’t felt like dinner alone in a restaurant so she’d ordered something from room service, and while she’d eaten she’d looked at the paper to see what movie she wanted to sit through tonight or if there was anything at all bearable on television.

  Had she gone to a movie? She couldn’t remember any movie, couldn’t remember any television either. What had she done after dinner? The last thing she could remember was eating dinner sitting on the chair at the writing-desk, the dishes spread out on the desk, the paper propped up against the wall in front of her. And feeling tired. And waking up here.

  Drugged? Could that be the reason for this headache and the vagueness of her memory of last night? It had been a different waiter who’d brought in her dinner, but that hadn’t meant anything at the time; there were several different waiters she’d seen in the last nine days.

  But that was what it must have been. She could remember eating dinner, not noticing any odd tastes about anything, and then growing very sleepy. Sitting at the writing-desk, the dishes in front of her, food left uneaten and she growing sleepier and sleepier.

  Had she gotten up from the desk and gone over to stretch out on the bed? She couldn’t remember exactly. It seemed as though she’d done that, or at least had wanted to do it, but she couldn’t remember whether or not she’d actually made it out of the chair and over to the bed.

  She rubbed her head. If only the pain would stop. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t concentrate.

  Who would do this?

  She looked at her watch. It was still running and it showed twenty-five minutes past four. Past four? It must be afternoon; she must have been asleep nearly twenty hours.

  She pushed the covers off and slowly put her legs over the side of the bed. She was very shaky, nerves all ajangle. The pain in her head was worse when she moved, so she moved slowly, gingerly. Also, she didn’t want anyone to hear her and know she was awake. If there was anyone around to hear.

  Standing made her dizzy. She kept one hand on the wall and tiptoed in stocking feet over to the door. It was locked. Gently she turned the knob, easily she pulled, and the door was locked.

  The windows? She took the long way around, always keeping next to the wall, one palm flat on the wall for support. She reached the first window, remained leaning against the wall beside it, and bent her head to the glass to look out.

 
; Second floor. A lake, with partially thawing ice, looking very cold and very bleak. Mountains beyond the lake, also cold, also bleak. A scruffy brown yard between the house and the lake, with a few bare-branched trees and some woody bushes. A dark, squat boathouse, and beside it a concrete deck.

  A key grated in the door behind her and she spun around, suddenly terrified, losing her balance and almost falling, but leaning against the wall instead. Staying there beside the window, she watched the door open and a man come in.

  It didn’t surprise her that he was one of the three who had been at the beginning of all this, before Gonor had shown up.

  He looked at her and said, “You’re awake. Good.” Then he frowned, studying her across the room. “Something wrong?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t find anything to say, and she was terrified of what he might do.

  He kept frowning, standing just inside the door, and then he seemed all at once to understand and to be made strangely embarrassed by it. He spread his hands, palms down. “You’re all right here,” he said. “You’re safe here. Do you want something to eat?”

  She shook her head again. Her fear was beginning to fade, not so much because of his assurances as his embarrassment, but there was still nothing to say to him.

  He looked around, apparently at a loss, wanting to establish contact and not knowing how. “If you need anything,” he said, “just knock on the door. I’ll come by.”

  “I need to go home,” she said. “Back to the hotel.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “Pretty soon. You sure you’re not hungry?”

  She surprised herself by asking, “Do you have any aspirin?”

  He smiled happily. “Sure,” he said. “Be right back.” He left, and she noticed he took the time to lock the door behind him.

  Now she was angry at herself for having asked. It had given him the contact he wanted; it had given him her acceptance of the situation. She felt as though she had allowed him a victory he didn’t deserve, and she considered refusing the aspirin when he brought it, but realized that would be an empty gesture and wouldn’t reclaim the loss.

  What a stupid way to be thinking. She looked around the room, cold and bare and minimal.

  She needed Parker.

  2

  Jock Daask liked his women with meat on their bones and brains in their heads, and this girl Claire had both. He sat across the kitchen table from her, watching her eat the corn flakes and milk that was the only food they had for her, and he reflected that he would have liked to have met her some other way. He reflected also on the sexual implications of their current roles in relation to one another kidnapper and victim but the possibilities for rape didn’t really interest him. Jock Daask wasn’t that sort of man.

  He wasn’t all that sure what sort of man he was, in fact. His current roles could only be described in negatives he had kidnapped but was not a kidnapper, he would steal but was not a thief and it seemed to him his whole life was expressed only in the same terms of contradiction. He had been born in Africa, but was not an African. His parents were Europeans, but he was not a European. He had done well at the university in England, but he was not an intellectual. He had been a mercenary soldier in various parts of Africa, but he was not a rootless adventurer. There was nothing about him, it seemed, that did not include its own negative.

  Jock Daask was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in Africa, and he had grown up always knowing that everything and everybody he saw belonged to his father and would one day belong to him. His friends in his youth were the children of other white landowners, and even then they had all seemed to be aware of their essential dislocation, at once the ruling class and exiles. Still, it was worth exile to be a member of the ruling class.

  Until independence. The nation of Dhaba was spared the more gruesome birth pains of many of the new African states, but even in a land of peaceful turnover one fact could not be gotten around: the white ruling class had to go.

  Daask had been in London at the time, doing postgraduate work at the university, and he hadn’t known anything was wrong until his father phoned him from London Airport to come out and pick him up. Their land had been taken from them, not by spear-waving cannibals but by paper-waving bureaucrats, bland men with empty smiles.

  The number of ex-colonists in London and in other parts of Europe continued to grow. And the idea of counterattack grew, from men like Aaron Marten, whom Daask had known since childhood, who were determined to get their own back one way or another no matter what. And from men like General Enfehr Goma, the unsuccessful first candidate for president of Dhaba, who would be willing to live the life of a comfortable figurehead if the Aaron Martens could put them on the throne.

  They could do it. There was nothing strategic about Dhaba, not in minerals or geographic location or rivers or anything else, and so no European power would intervene. The neighboring African states all had sufficient internal problems to keep them from doing anything more than complain at the UN. All they needed was the money to mount the offensive. The current president, Colonel Joseph Lubudi, was so patently corrupt that the masses of the nation might even welcome General Goma, or at least wouldn’t be violently opposed to him.

  But it couldn’t be done without money. And from where would the money come? The ex-landowners had lost practically everything. General Goma had no money of his own and couldn’t attract the support of anyone with money. So where would they get the money?

  From Dhaba. From Colonel Lubudi. From the Colonel’s brother-in-law, Patrick Kasempa.

  Daask again looked at the woman Claire eating a third bowl of cereal. If he were Parker, and this Claire were his woman, he would trade Gonor and the diamonds for her in a minute. Parker would cooperate; Daask was sure of it.

  She became aware of his eyes on her and abruptly stopped eating. “That’s all I want,” she said sullenly, pushing the bowl away.

  “You must still be hungry,” he said, trying to sound gentle and friendly. He knew it was absurd, but he wanted her not to dislike him.

  And it was true that she had to still be hungry. She hadn’t eaten since the drugged dinner at the hotel in Boston last night at around seven o’clock, and here it was nearly midnight. Twenty-nine hours without food. Bob had insisted they not offer her anything to eat until she asked for it, so all she had had at first was the aspirin and water he’d brought her this afternoon. When she’d finally knocked on the door and asked for something to eat it was clear she hadn’t wanted to ask for anything at all but had been driven to it by hunger.

  And something in his expression when she’d met his eyes just now had driven her away from hunger again. “I don’t want any more,” she said and folded her arms as though she were chilly, though it was warm here in the kitchen.

  Bob Quilp was out in the living-room waiting for the call from Aaron saying that Parker would cooperate, that everything was going to be all right. Daask had a very strong feeling about the closeness of this kitchen, his solitude with this woman, the persistent sexual overtones of the relationship thrust upon them. He couldn’t help it, and he didn’t intend to do anything about it, but the aura itself was pleasurable and he wanted to prolong it.

  “A glass of milk,” he said. “Would you like that?”

  “I want to go upstairs again,” she said. She got to her feet and stood there waiting.

  Daask was suddenly irritated by her. Didn’t she feel the ambience between them? Wasn’t she aware of what sort of person he couldbe, how lucky she was that he was gentle? He wanted to say something about it, to point it out to her, but he couldn’t find any phrasing that didn’t sound silly somehow. Or threatening.

  He shrugged and got to his feet. “Up to you,” he said. “You go first.”

  They went up to the second floor, and she went willingly into her room. He stood in the doorway a minute, watching her go over to the bed and sit down with her back to him.

 
; Then he said, “In a little while we’ll have to tie you up.”

  She turned her head, and it pleased him to see a little glint of fear in her eyes. “Why? I won’t try to get away.”

  “We’ll be leaving,” he said. “We’ll tie you when we go. But we’re going to tell Parker where you are, so don’t worry. He’ll probably be here before morning.”

  She shook her head. “He won’t do what you want him to do.”

  “Of course he will,” Daask said reasonably. “You’re more important to him than Gonor is; it only makes sense.”

  “He can’t stand to be pushed,” she said.

  “He’ll cooperate,” Daask said. “It’s only sensible.”

  She shrugged and turned her back again.

  Daask was about to say something else, but from downstairs he heard the ringing of a telephone. “That’s it now,” he said and shut the door. He locked it and hurried back downstairs.

  3

  William Manado sat on the floor in the back of the truck and fingered his machine gun. It was too dark to see anything except when an occasional automobile drove down Thirty-eighth Street from Park Avenue and its headlights shone through the windows in the rear doors, illuminating himself and Formutesca sitting across the way. Formutesca smiled encouragingly at him every time there was light that way, but in the intervals of darkness there was no encouragement from anywhere, and Manado was frightened.

  He hadn’t shown it; not to Formutesca, not to Parker, certainly not to Gonor. He hadn’t shown it, he wouldn’t show it, and he wouldn’t let it interfere. But he couldn’t deny it either he was afraid.

  Unlike Formutesca and Gonor, unlike most of the governing class of Dhaba, Manado was not from a professional family. There were no doctors, lawyers, civil servants or engineers in his background. He had come from a village family, a very poor village family, and he would be a very poor villager himself today if it were not for one thing. Manado could run.

  He was fast, and he was tireless, and he could pace himself. He had run himself on to the track team at Tchidanga School, and he had run himself into an exchange scholarship for a Midwestern American university. Fortunately, his brain was as fast as his body, and he’d been able to take advantage of the advantages his running had brought him. He majored in political science at the American university, mostly because all exchange students were expected to major in political science, and took his minor in mathematics, because he liked to watch numbers run. As for America, what that country offered him because he had brains and speed baffled him almost as much as what was refused him because he was black. Afterwards, when people at home asked him about that, what it was like to be a black man in America, he always said, “Well, it takes some getting used to.” What he meant was, “I’m not sure, but I think maybe it’s worth getting used to.”