Firebreak

by Richard Stark

  "Well, it's a smart setup," Parker said. 'They can keep tighter security if their bunch doesn't mingle with anybody else."

  'Then they've got good security," Wiss said.

  Elkins said, "Parker? What do you think?"

  "There's never more than one car away from the place at a time," Parker said. "I guess the idea is, they want to keep the staff up to strength as much as they can."

  "Good security again," Wiss commented.

  "I looked up that road once," Parker said, "and about a mile up it starts to twist through some pretty thick forest. We wait till they go out, drive up into the forested part, stop on a blind curve, take the Blazer away from them when they come back. Then we can at least get to the house without setting anything off. But once they see we're somebody else, they'll jump to the alarms. The question is, what can Lloyd do, back in Massachusetts, to keep those alarms from getting off the property?"

  "We'll ask him," Elkins said.

  8

  A little after seven that morning, when it would be nine a.m. in New York, Parker phoned Claire at the hotel. She should still be in the room, finishing her coffee, putting on her face.

  She was. "I'm glad you called," she said, and he could hear the tension in her voice.

  "Something happened?"

  "I called Louise," she said, Louise being the woman who cleaned the house by the lake every Thursday. "I called her yesterday, to make sure everything was all right, and she said the lock was broken on the lakeside door."

  "Nobody there?"

  "Not when she was there, not that she noticed. And it didn't seem to her anything had been taken."

  Or left, Parker thought. That was the more important question. Had anything been left there, maybe to blow up, or maybe to signal people waiting. He said, "I was calling to say I'm coming back east, I'd see you in the city, we could have dinner."

  "I'd like that."

  "But I think I better look at the house first, then call you again."

  "All right. Today?"

  "I'm gonna be on too many planes today," he said. "I'll call you tomorrow."

  "All right."

  'The other thing I wanted," he said. "In the city, see if you can find somebody who reads Cyrillic."

  "You mean like Russian?"

  "Russian. Yes."

  9

  Once, some years ago, there had been people inside Claire's house that Parker hadn't wanted there, and he'd come in that time at night, in a rowboat taken from another house on the opposite side of the lake, guided by the lights gleaming from houses along the shore. He did the same now, but later, three in the morning, no light visible from any of the houses around him. That other time he'd come across from the far side of the lake, but tonight he started looking for a boat about a quarter mile east of Claire's house, out near the state road.

  All the houses along here were shut for the winter. The first two had no boats that he could find, but the third came with a boathouse, like Claire's, and beside it on a concrete dock a small fiberglass dinghy lay facedown. When he rolled it over, its oars were on the concrete beneath it. He put the boat in the water, took one oar to use as a paddle, sat in the boat facing front, as though it were a canoe, and started along the shoreline.

  Farther out, starshine defined the water, but this close to shore he was shadowed by the surrounding trees and hills. The houses were hard to tell apart in darkness this complete. It would be the boathouse he'd recognize, not the house itself.

  He slid through the water, almost completely silent, the faint whisperings of boat and oar blended into the cool silence of the night. Soon the boathouse was a blacker black ahead of him, blocky, looming. He shipped the oar, let the boat coast forward, then leaned out with one palm to fend off from the corner of the boathouse, keeping the boat clear. Hands along the rough wall of the boathouse on his right, he eased around to the wooden dock, and stopped it there before it could clatter against the concrete patio.

  His pistol was in his inside jacket pocket. He put it on the dock in darkness in front of him, at chest height, then stood, leaned forward, went from standing in the boat to kneeling on the dock, the boat shying backward away from him, turning lazily back out toward the lake. He held the pistol, both knees and one palm on the dock, and looked toward the house.

  Nothing. Pitch black, under its surrounding trees. The trees were tall and skinny on this side, sparsely placed between house and lake. He moved forward cautiously, left hand out so he wouldn't run into one of those trees, and eventually came to the screened porch. The door there opened without a sound.

  It was the inner door that had been broken into, from what Claire had said, and it wouldn't have been fixed yet. Parker crossed to it, and felt the broken glass, then eased open the door and stepped inside.

  The next hour was slow and careful. Parker moved as though the house were foreign to him and full of enemies. He searched for people, for booby traps, for signs of the interlopers. But at the end of it, there was no one and nothing here.

  The electricity was turned off, and he left it like that. He went to the living room, sat on the sofa there, and from time to time dozed until dawn, then got up and made another very slow circuit through the house, this time touching nothing, looking at everything.

  They hadn't searched the place. They hadn't taken anything. The only sign they'd been here was the broken glass on the lakeside door.

  They'd had a reason to come. If not to take anything, then to leave something.

  Yes. Full daylight, and at last he saw it. Above the main door into the living room from outside, in from the front of the house toward the road, a narrow brown hair now dangled down from the top of the frame. If he were to open that door, it would brush the hair slightly.

  Parker got a chair from the dining room, put it against the wall a few feet to the right of the door, and stood on it. Resting atop the door frame was what looked like a very small jeweler's loupe, dulled black metal, round, with a flat non-reflecting glass front. The hair drooped down from that.

  A radio camera. If anyone came in that front door, the primary entrance to the house, the hair would move, and the camera would switch on, to broadcast the scene in this living room to its base.

  How far would the base be from here? They'd want to be close enough to act, far enough away to be out of sight.

  And there'd be a second camera, too, in the garage, in case he were to come in that way. He didn't need to look for it, he knew it was there. Or maybe not even a camera out there, but merely something to tell them when the electric garage door opener had been operated.

  Parker put the chair back in the dining room, walked to the screened-in porch, looked out at the lake. Last night's rowboat floated way out there, turning slowly. In crisp fall sunlight, it was vermilion. All the houses he could see were blank-faced, closed for the season.

  They could be in any house around the lake. He didn't have the time to search the whole area, and he couldn't cover all that territory without being seen.

  Would they come here sometimes, check on the house, on the camera? He didn't want to leave here during daylight, so he went to the kitchen, where he could see the lake and the living room, and waited.

  The refrigerator was turned off, door open, but there was dry food in the pantry. He ate, and waited, and no one appeared, and after dark he went out through the screen porch and walked down other people's yards to where he'd left the car.

  For now, they could have the house.

  10

  They had a late dinner, and a good night together, and in the morning breakfast in the room, during which Claire said, "I found a woman who reads Russian. Well, she is Russian."

  "Good."

  "She's a partner at a furrier in midtown."

  "Not one I ever visited, I hope," he said.

  She laughed, saying, "No, I'm sure it's all right. She came over from Russia since the breakup, it's a big family in the fur business over there, sable exporting, they decided to get into thi
s end of the trade three years ago."

  "You're buying something from her," Parker suggested.

  "Of course." Claire shrugged. "Why else would she talk to me?"

  * * *

  Madame Irina was a short pouter pigeon of a woman, in a tight black pantsuit and cotton boll white hair. A pair of harlequin glasses that hung from a gold chain around her neck rested on the shelf of her chest. Her black slippers whispered on the thick black wool of the carpet.

  The room was smallish, luxuriously Spartan, with neutral gray walls and a low white ceiling. Low maroon armchairs and sofas made three conversation areas around oval glass coffee tables on which glossy magazines were carefully arranged, like a line of shingles on a roof, as though this were the waiting room for an interplanetary cruise line. Three very tall mannequins in corners, with faces of foreign disdain, wore rich long fur coats.

  To the right, a plate-glass window showed an efficient cream office with four employees, all of whom kept glancing this way. The glass would be bulletproof. The valuable stock would be beyond the other door, gray, almost invisible, set into the wall opposite the entrance.

  The entrance itself, here on the third floor of this building on Madison Avenue, was a simple airlock-style. They had come out of the elevator, to be eye-balled by the people in the office, who had a second plate-glass window on that side for the purpose. Claire had spoken to a microphone, a polite metallic voice had said, "Of course, Mrs. Willis, come in," and the buzzer had sounded, letting them through a windowed door into a square gray cubicle with another windowed door straight ahead. The door behind them had gently but forcefully snicked itself shut, as Madame Irina had come smiling across the showroom, moving very like a pouter pigeon who has decided, as a whim, to walk just for today.

  Parker was certain this inner door wouldn't be openable if he were to keep the first one from shutting, which he didn't do. Madame Irina let them in, door number two shut itself behind them, and here they were.

  Parker wasn't here for work, but his response was automatic. He saw it would take two men and a woman to do the job, and he thought Noelle Kay Braselle would do the woman very well. Of course, now that he'd been here with Claire, neither of the men could be him. It was just an instinctive reaction.

  "Madame Irina, my husband Charles."

  "How do you do, Mr. Charles." Her accent was lilting, seeming more French than Russian. In fact, she wasn't the Russian he'd expected. Her manner was coolly highbred, as though the entire Bolshevik interlude had been no more than unpleasant weekend guests who'd overstayed their welcome. The Russia she came from still had czars.

  There was a little discussion between the two women about the three coats Claire had decided to choose among, and then Madame Irina made a murmuring phone call while standing at her gray plastic block desk. Hanging up the gray receiver, she said, 'They'll bring them right out. And Mr. Charles has some names for me to look at?"

  "Yes, show them, Charles."

  The story was that Charles Willis, a shoe manufacturer with a strong export business, had been told in-directly of a couple of Americans who might be useful in helping him expand his business into the western segments of the old Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the origin of the tip was a Russian who only spoke Russian and only used Cyrillic, so Charles Willis couldn't read the names and therefore didn't know if these were people he already knew or would find it useful to look up. Fortunately, Charles Willis's business was profitable enough so that his wife was buying fur coats from Madame Irina, who could be very helpful in translating these two names.

  All of that had been explained by Claire on her previous visit, so all Parker had to do now was take from his jacket pocket the slip of paper with the names on it and hand it over, just as the near-invisible door at the back of the room opened and three models strutted in, wearing the coats.

  It was now Parker's job to turn away from Madame Irina and look with interest at the coats, while the models turned and stepped in front of Claire, smiling in a blank way at her, not acknowledging the existence of the husband for a second.

  That one's too dark," she decided.

  "If you say so."

  "Charles? Do you think this one's too long?"

  "Try it on yourself," he said.

  "You're right."

  The model swirled out of the coat, showing the plain black spaghetti-strap dress beneath, and helped Claire put it on, gesturing toward the full-length mirror on the side wall, as Madame Irina said, 'Yes, Mr. Charles, these are Americans."

  He gave her the kind of attention Claire was giving the coats. "Which Americans?"

  She held the sheet up to show him.

  n.EpoK M.Poaehwteph

  "This first one," she said, touching it, "is the initial P. Then the last name is B-R-O-K. But I think here it would be B-R-O-C-K."

  Brock. Paul Brock. Parker had thought he'd never hear from Paul Brock again. The last time he'd seen the man, Parker had shot him and he lay on his back, unable to move, moaning for an ambulance, at the foot of the basement stairs he'd fallen down.

  Parker pointed at the other name. "Would that be Rosenstein? Matt Rosenstein?"

  "Rosenstein, yes," she said, smiling, pleased with them both. "And the initial is M. So you would know these people."

  "Oh, yes, I know them," Parker said. "And the Russian was right. They're going to be very useful to me."

  "I think this one," Claire said. She pirouetted, showing off for him and the mirror. Seeing his face in the mirror, she smiled and said, "I think we're both getting what we want."

  11

  The restaurant was around the corner from Madison Avenue, three blocks from Madame Irina. Inside, it was crowded, tables too close together, people eating elbow to elbow at the long banquette down the right side. In front of the restaurant, on the sidewalk, only two of the tables within the wrought-iron railing were occupied, one of them by Parker and Claire. It was cool out here, traffic noise from the avenue was constant, but they could talk in private.

  Parker waited till they'd ordered and the food had arrived. Then he said, "Every once in a while, something that was old that was supposed to be done with, comes back and has to be dealt with again. This is one of those."

  'Tell me about it."

  "A few years ago," he said, "while I was away on a job, you went to see some people in New Orleans."

  "Oh, yes," she said. "Lorraine and Jim."

  "I phoned you to wire me money."

  "I remember," she said. "You called twice. The first time for five hundred dollars, and the second time for three thousand."

  "It was a job that went bad," Parker said. "I came back with nothing."

  "You came back," she said.

  He shrugged that away. "We were four," he said. "One of them that I didn't know, his name was George Uhl, it turned out he was a crazy. He tried to kill the three of us to keep the money for himself. He got the other two, and I had to go after him. That's when I phoned you."

  "George Uhl," she said. 'That isn't one of the names you showed Madame Irina."

  "No. Uhl is dead now," Parker said. "But he had a friend, this Matt Rosenstein, and Rosenstein dealt himself in to take the money just because he knew it was there. Brock was his partner, or front man. I had to talk with them because they might know where Uhl was. But then they wanted in."

  "And those two are still alive," she said.

  "When I last saw them," Parker said, "they were both wounded, neither one of them was moving, and they were in a house where they'd been holding a family prisoner. The woman there had no reason to do anything after I left but call the cops. If she called the cops, those two, if they lived, are in jail the rest of their lives. But somehow they're around somewhere, and they sent a fellow to get me. Revenge, I suppose. They have somebody else out there now, watching the house. I'm on another thing, nothing to do with Brock and Rosenstein, and I don't have the time for this distraction now. The other thing'll go down soon, and then I'll see what to do about Brock and
Rosenstein."

  "But until then," she said, "I can't go to my house."

  "I'm sorry for that," he said. "I know you'd rather be there."

  'That's all right," she said. "I'll stay in the city until the alterations are done on my coat, and then I'll wear it for a while in Paris."

  12

  "Good," Elkins said, sounding hurried. "I was hoping you'd call pretty quick."

  I had things to do," Parker said. This pay phone at LaGuardia airport was surrounded by other callers with problems of their own, and the number he'd dialed was a pay phone at a gas station in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he having ten minutes earlier called Elkins' motel room in the same town to let the phone ring once. Now, hearing the trouble in Elkins' voice, he said, "What went wrong?"

  "Larry apparently had a security lapse," Elkins said.

  "What, the law got him?"

  "No, not that kind. It affects us, you and me and Ralph. Come on up here, we'll dope this out."

  The car he chose from long-term parking was a gray Volvo with the parking lot's ticket stuck behind the visor, a date on the ticket of the day before yesterday, and a nearly full gas tank. Three and a half hours later he left it in the municipal parking lot in Great Barrington and walked to the motel, about a mile out north of the main town among the big stores and fast-food restaurants. Elkins was in room 11, and when he opened to Parker's knock Wiss and Lloyd were in there, too. Elkins and Wiss both looked worried, Lloyd mostly embarrassed.

  They'd opened the connecting doors between this room and number 12, and brought the chairs from that one in here, so everybody could sit at the round wood-look table under the hanging swag lamp, with Elkins' green Honda and the traffic of state route 7 outside the window. Parker said, "What security? Who found out what?"