The Handle

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Easier than that,” Parker said. “You and Grofield go out there every night. On the job, you'll be going out in Baron's boat anyway, so you do it every night. I disappear. They know the job's still on because you two are around, but they can't find me. Every night for a week you two go out to the island, eat a meal, lose a little dough we'll get from the Outfit, come back. Then one night Ross and I go out and we do the job. They don't know how we got there, they never even see Ross, and we're away free and clear.”

  Ross said, “I don't want them seeing me at the end of it all, going back to the mainland.”

  Parker told him, “They can see you and not connect you with us. We can work that out.”

  “How?”

  Grofield said, “What if we hire some people, a few boys and girls to be like a party? Ross takes them out to the island, they keep out of the way while we're working, and then they stand around on deck while Ross takes us all back to the mainland. We three stay down below.”

  Ross nodded, saying, “That could work. You'd all have to be careful you weren't seen coming to the boat, that's all.”

  “We don't have to hire anybody,” Parker said. “There'll be more people than boats out there. We just move some of the extra down to our boat, people who didn't come in boats of their own.”

  “And where do we hit land?” Ross asked. “Not back to Galveston.”

  “No city at all,” Parker told him. “Just a beach, someplace like that. You and I, we pick the place beforehand, put a car there to be ready for us.”

  Grofield said, “And our passengers?”

  “What about them?”

  Grofield shrugged. “What do we do with them, once we land and it isn't Galveston?”

  “We leave them,” Parker said. “We get in the car and go. What's the problem?”

  “Just asking,” said Grofield.

  Salsa said, “We still do it, then. The same as before, the same as we worked out, but with these extras.”

  Parker said, “There's no reason to walk out on it.”

  “Good luck to us,” said Grofield. “Bonne chance to us. Parker, you get very funny jobs. Copper Canyon was only slightly crazy compared to this. This time, the law knows the job is going to be pulled, knows who's going to do it and how, and doesn't care. It's like walking into a bank and the guard at the door hands you a piece of paper and on it is the combination to the vault.”

  Ross got to his feet. “If we're done…”

  They were done. Parker said to him, “I'll be in touch with you tomorrow, after I shake my tail.”

  “Good. I'd like to leave first, boys, if it's all right.”

  Grofield said, “Sure. We'll give you five minutes.”

  After Ross left, Salsa said, “How many days?”

  “Eight. We'll hit at ten forty-five the eighth night.” Parker got to his feet. “Wait a second.” He went back to the bedroom, where Crystal was waiting for them to be finished, and said, “Come in here a minute.”

  “Sure thing.” She'd been lying in bed, reading, wearing an orange sweater and black stretch pants. She got up and stepped into shoes and followed him into the living room.

  Parker said, “From now on, the contact with the Outfit is through Grofield and Crystal. Grofield's going to want some stuff, some money and maybe other things, and he'll talk through you. Right?”

  Crystal smiled at Grofield. “I don't care,” she said.

  “I don't mind myself,” Grofield told her.

  Salsa got to his feet. “Time for us to leave. See you soon, Parker.”

  Grofield and Salsa headed for the door, Grofield saying to Crystal, “I may need lots of stuff. All kinds of stuff.”

  “You just come and talk to me,” she said. “Count on it, honey.”

  They left, and Parker went to the bedroom to pack. Crystal came after him and stood in the doorway saying, “You going away?”

  “Got to. Part of it.”

  “You have to leave this minute? It couldn't wait half an hour?”

  He barely listened to her, didn't get what she meant. His thoughts now were limited to the job. He said, “Now's the best time,” and finished packing. She sulked when he left, but it was wasted; he never saw it.

  THREE

  1

  Grofield walked into the department store, took an elevator up to the second floor and the stairs back down, left through a different door to a different street, flagged a cab and rode three blocks, then jumped from the cab into a city bus.

  Straphanging in the bus, Grofield considered. Should he lose the third one, too? Then let them find him again back at the motel.

  There was no point in any of this, it was just Grofield's way to fill the dull spaces. Eight days of inactivity were stretching out like a rubber band toward the robbery at the far end, and Grofield had stood three days of it before going dramatic. Men like Parker and Salsa could just sit there, silent and patient, waiting for the moment to go to work, but Grofield wasn't built like that.

  There was an air of dark energy around Grofield, a nervous predatory pacing. He wasn't a man who liked to be still. In his acting work he was most often cast as a heavy, either a villain or some sort of sick weakling, and he himself was proudest of his performance as Iago, a lean and sensual and catlike Iago, in a tent theater production of Othello in Racine, Wisconsin. Had he gone to Hollywood he would have made his fortune in television, and he knew it, but television was not for him. He was dedicated, sincere, juvenile; only the legitimate theater was worth the expenditure of true acting talent.

  There's a good living in the legitimate theater for a very few, and a rotten living for a great multitude. Never having made it big, and being so weighed down with acting integrity it was unlikesalsly he ever would make it big, Grofield was a member of acting's underpaid multitude. But his other profession — the vocation he practiced every year or so with men like Parker and Salsa and Ross — supported him just fine, made it possible for him to remain an actor, keep his integrity, and still live as well as he wanted.

  The two professions complemented one another. The robberies helped him in his characterizations of the roles he was so often given to play, and the acting ability more than once had come in handy in the course of a robbery. Both professions appealed to the same urgent, dramatic, energetic streak in him, and in spending his time between them Grofield was a happy man.

  Except for inactivity. He couldn't stand to have nothing to do. to be forced to wait.

  This time, he had lasted three days. Each evening he and Salsa went out to the island, had dinner, watched the cockfights, gambled a little, and finally came back to shore; that time was pleasant, bearing a kind of muted drama. But the mornings and afternoons were just empty, and emptiness was what Grofield couldn't stand. For three days he'd filled the dead hours as best he could with movies, but by now he'd seen every movie in the Galveston area he wanted to see, and a few he didn't want to see, and so today there was nothing for it but to play games.

  It had taken him an hour of erratic, pulsing, random motion around Galveston and Texas City and LaMarque before he had been sure how many Federals were following him and what each of them looked like. Another half hour of prowling, starting and stopping, hurrying and creeping, turning and back-tracking, had made him familiar with their methods. Now, in five minutes of razzle-dazzle, he'd cut them from three to one, and he knew he could get rid of the third any time he wanted. The question was, did he want?

  Reluctantly, he decided he'd better not. Already Parker had dusted them off his tail; if now Grofield did the same thing, they might not wait around for him to show back at the motel. They might grab Salsa right away, seeing as Salsa would be all they'd have left. They might just louse up the whole operation if Grofield played too many games with them.

  Grofield shrugged. At the next stop, he swung down off the bus and walked back to the cab parked half a block away. The Fed was playing it as cagey as possible under the circumstances, staying in the cab until he saw exactl
y what Grofield was going to do next.

  Grofield strolled back and stuck his head in the cab window. “I'm going back to the motel now,” he said pleasantly. “Why don't we take the same cab and save us some money?”

  The Fed looked at him with disgust. Federal agents were all alike; upright, honest, courteous, kind, self-righteous, and humorless. “Take your own cab,” he said.

  “You're wasting the taxpayers’ money,” Grofield told him.

  The Fed didn't say anything. He turned his head and looked stonily out the other window. Up front the cabby was grinning and trying not to show it.

  “Have it your own way,” Grofield said. “I'll see you later.” He straightened up and started away, then changed his mind and went back, saying, “Correction, I'm not going back to the motel. I'm going first to see the fair Crystal, and then I'm going back to the motel.”

  The Fed turned and looked at Grofield. “I have patience,” he said. “I have patience and I can wait.”

  Grofield grinned at him. “You remind me of Parker,” he said. “The two of you, sparkling, scintillating, a million laughs.” He waved, and went away again, and this time flagged a cab and rode it to Crystal's apartment house.

  He had an excuse for going, if not exactly a reason. Crystal was his contact with the Outfit, from whom all blessings flowed, including the money Grofield and Salsa were spending every night out on the island of Cockaigne, and it was more or less true they needed more cash. They had enough to last another couple of days, so he was rushing things a little going to see Crystal now, but he felt up, he felt tense and expectant, the little bit of horseplay with the Federal agents had only whetted his appetite for more.

  The other cab trailed along like something attached by a string. Grofield looked back at it from time to time and laughed, picturing the Parker-like face of that Federal man back there. When he got out of the cab at Crystal's place he paused long enough to wave at the Fed before going on into the building.

  Grofield heard music, movie-type background music. He heard it all the time, in every part of his life. For the last half hour or so the music had all been of cops-and-robbers movie type, with a lot of drums and trumpets and syncopation, but now as he went up in the elevator to Crystal's apartment the music changed, became light, frothy, semicomic, the kind of music that backs Jack Lemmon or Cary Grant on their way to see Shirley MacLaine or Doris Day. Grofield strode out of the elevator whistling and did a little dance step in the middle of the hall.

  At first, after he rang the bell, he thought she wasn't home. He waited and waited by the closed door, while the music began to change again, and soon the air around his head was swollen with tear-stained violins; missing in action, erroneously reported dead, he was returning home at last, shattered in mind and body, five years after the war, not yet knowing his wife had remarried.

  But the n the door opened and she was standing there in a robe, not entirely awake. Sleepiness didn't bloat Crystal, as it does to so many, it merely made her a bit fuzzy around the edges. She said, “Wha? What is it?”

  “It's two p.m., my darling. Forgive my waking you so early, but I didn't want you to miss the sunset.”

  “I was taking a nap. You want to come in?”

  “Sweetheart, you don't know how I've longed to hear those words from your lips.”

  She squinted, trying to bring his face and her mind both into focus. Her robe was half open, and underneath it she was wearing pale blue pajamas. “You're kidding around,” she said.

  “That's right,” he said, “I am. Do you want to sleep some more? I'll come back later.”

  “No, no, that's all right. Come on in.”

  She stepped out of the way and Grofield walked into the apartment, shutting the door behind him. They both went into the living room, and she said, “You want a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Coffee? I didn't just get up, you did. I'll take the something.”

  She waved a hand vaguely. “Bar's over there. Excuse me, I'll be back in just a minute.”

  “Don't get dressed,” he said.

  She squinted some more. She was one of the few women Grofield had ever met who could squint without ruining her looks. She said, “What was that?”

  “You look very sexy,” he said. “Robe and pajamas, very sexy. If you just had the robe on, half open like that, that would be just conventionally sexy, you know what I mean? But with the blue pajamas, just the hint of an outline of breast, swell of hip, it adds a whole new dimension.”

  She was waking up now. “Is that right?” she said, and her tone said tell-me-more.

  Grofield said, “I've noticed the same thing about my wife.”

  “You're married?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “You start a pass,” she said, “and then you tell me you're married. Now you go back to throwing the pass, right?”

  Grofield grinned and nodded. “Right.”

  “And if I take you up on it, it's on your terms. I already know you're married, so I can't have any complaints later on.”

  “If it was a line I'd worked up, honey,” he said, “I would have used it before I was married and today I might not be married.”

  “If you are.”

  “Oh, I am, all right.”

  She seemed to consider, and then she said, “If I'm going to be catching passes, I ought to have something to drink. But I just woke up.”

  “Coffee royal.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. Wait here, I'll go make the coffee.”

  Grofield smiled after her as she left the room. Easiest thing in the world, and a nice pleasant way to fill the mornings and afternoons between now and work time. A lot more fun than tantalizing Feds, too.

  Parker was crazy, moving out on something like this.

  She came back eventually, with two cups of black coffee on a tray. She set it down on the coffee table and went over to the bar, saying, “I don't understand you guys, and I've met a million of you.”

  Grofield didn't believe there were a million of him. He said, “Such as?”

  “Married, but on the prowl. If you're gonna keep going back to the wife, why leave her? If you're going to keep leaving her, why go back?”

  “Two different things,” Grofield told her, thinking he ought to call Mary today. He'd do it when he left here.

  “Two different things,” echoed Crystal. “I don't get it.” She came over with a bottle of whiskey. “Where's your wife now? In town here?”

  “Good God, no. In Estes Park, Colorado.”

  “Is that where you live? How much of this stuff should we pour in?”

  “As much as the cup will hold, my dear. Very nice. No, she is acting with a theatrical troupe. As will I be in few weeks.”

  Interest quickened in her eyes. “You're an actor?”

  “The heir apparent to the crown of John Barry more, that's all.”

  “What have you been—?”

  But the doorbell sounded, breaking into the question, leaving Grofield with mixed emotions. He was glad the trite question had been interrupted, but irritated to have the progression with this delightful girl interrupted. He said, “Ignore it.”

  “I can't. It might be something important.” She was already on her feet and halfway across the room.

  “Ah, well. Hurry back to me.”

  She flashed him a smile over her shoulder and went on out to the foyer. A minute later she was back, looking troubled, and behind her came two men, one of them the Fed who earlier had refused to share a cab with Grofield. He was the one who said, “Alan Grofield?”

  “You have the honor,” Grofield told him.

  Crystal said, “Is that your first name? Alan? I like that.”

  “Nice of you.”

  “You come with us,” said the Fed, talking to Grofield.

  Something cold touched Grofield in the pit of the stomach. “This is a pinch?”

  The other Fed said, “You're not under arrest, don't worry about it. We
want to talk to you.”

  “Why don't we talk here? Sure lovely surroundings, a charming hostess…”

  “Downtown,” said the first Fed.

  “You,” Grofield told him, “are trying to be difficult. And are succeeding wondrous well. All right, if you insist you insist.” He got to his feet and said to Crystal, “I'll come back when I can. We'll continue our discussion.’“

  “I'll like that.”

  Grofield smiled at her, a trifle sadly — Rex Harrison as the gentle jewel thief, being taken from the hotel suite in Cannes — and patted her cheek as he went by. The background music was ironic, sophisticated, subtly jazzy.

  Riding down in the elevator, down a corridor, and into an office where a middle-aged white-haired gent who looked like Hopalong Cassidy said, “Sit down, Mr. Grofield.”

  Grofield sat down. “I won't tell who Mister Big is,” he announced. “My lips are sealed.”

  Hopalong Cassidy rewarded him with a thin smile. “We know who Mister Big is,” he said. “What we want to know is where he is. Where's Parker?”

  Grofield did Willy Best, big eyes and sagging underlip and all. “Who? Who dat?”

  Hopalong Cassidy shook his head, but was still smiling around the corners of his mouth. “Don't play like that, Mr. Grofield,” he said. “If you won't talk sense with me, I'll just have to have you detained for a day or two until you feel more reasonable.”

  Grofield shook his head. “No, you won't. You detain me and everybody else runs out and the whole deal is off. You know that as well as I do.”

  “They'd leave you?” Hopalong acted as though he thought he could get mileage out of that idea.

  Grofield nipped it in the bud. “They'd leave me,” he said, “almost as fast as I'd leave them.”

  Hopalong leaned back in his chair and tapped some fingers on his desk. “We want to know what's going on,” he said. “We want to know where Parker is, and we want to know when you people are going out to that island.”