The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

He left the telegram on the nightstand. It took him twenty minutes to pack his suitcases and settle his bill. Another ten minutes and he was on 66 heading east. “Poor Aunt Hattie,” he said. “I wonder if she mentioned me in her will.”

  FIVE

  When Giordano opened his travel agency in Phoenix, a few of his friends told him he ought to change his name. “Because face it, Lou,” one of them said, “there’s this image people have of Italians. Me, I’m in construction, an Italian builder is something the average Joe can understand. But who’s gonna do business with a travel agent named Giordano?”

  “Anybody who wants to go to Rome,” Giordano said.

  Not many people did, as it happened. Giordano’s Travel Bureau occupied three magnificently appointed rooms in the best office building in downtown Phoenix, and Giordano himself occupied a penthouse at the Wentworth Arms, and everyone knew he had to be grossing better than fifty thousand a year. Everybody was wrong. The travel agency had everything but customers, largely because Giordano spent so much of his time traveling on his own and so little time handling business. He made enough to cover the salaries of the two girls who worked for him. His books—the ones he consulted when he filed his tax return—showed a net profit for the past year of twenty-one thousand dollars. The real books showed a slight loss, but not enough of one to get concerned about.

  Giordano was 31, toothpick thin, with straight brown hair and angular features. He went into the Army looking like the 97-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas ads, and he enlisted in the hope that the service would build him up. He did put on a few pounds at first, and the little flesh he carried on his frame turned almost at once to muscle, but he never did stop looking undernourished. By the time he came home from Laos, a bad dose of malaria had him looking as bad as he did when he enlisted, and a hell of a lot older. On top of everything else, somewhere in the course of things his eyesight deteriorated, so now he was not only a shrimp but a shrimp who wore glasses.

  He fooled people. Thin frame, thin legs, wrists like a schoolgirl, thick glasses, he fooled people all the time. When the colonel got them all together in Philadelphia for Operation Sharkbait, he planted himself as an invalid accountant with a ton of hospital bills. He got into the loan shark for a couple of thousand, not because the money mattered—the big score was almost forty times that figure—but in order to get a closer look at the loan shark’s operation.

  The timing got slightly screwed up on that operation. The shark sent a couple of muscle boys after Giordano before the squad was ready to pull the chain, and Giordano came home one day to find a pair of heavies waiting in his room. He played his part as long as he could, whining and begging and promising to pay, but scaring wasn’t enough. They had orders to rough him up a little. His better judgment told him to take the beating, that they were pros and wouldn’t overdo it, but when they reached for him, his reflexes took over. He flipped one of the goons off a wall and chopped the other one in the Adam’s apple. Then he stood looking down at them and cursed himself quietly for jeopardizing the whole score. If they went back to their boss with the news that the sick, puny accountant was a tiger in disguise, things could suddenly get very sticky.

  So he gave them each an extra chop in the neck. After he had made sure that they were both properly dead, he made a phone call, and Murdock and Frank Dehn drove over in a truck and carried the two hoods out in a pair of steamer trunks. They shipped them both express collect to Seattle. Giordano checked the papers for weeks afterward and never saw a line about it

  Giordano fooled women, too. They started off feeling sorry for him, certain they would be safe with him. The outcome surprised them as much as it surprised the two hoods in Philadelphia, although the women rarely felt bad about it. He used a sort of mental karate, pitching the charm at just the right level until they felt that they could perform the kindest and most charitable act of their lives by going to bed with him. The next thing they knew they were hysterical with passion. By morning they would be madly in love with Giordano, who would never see them again. It wasn’t a matter of principle with him. He had told friends that he was spending his entire life looking for a woman he would want to see a second time, and he just hadn’t found her yet.

  Nor did he intend to abandon the search. On Tuesday night his telephone rang while he was searching industriously with a six-foot Swedish blonde whose breasts each weighed about as much as Giordano. The phone picked a very bad time to ring, and Giordano flipped the receiver onto the floor and went back to what he was doing. He never did get around to putting it back on the hook, so he didn’t get the colonel’s wire until he went to the office the next morning.

  “Get me on an afternoon flight to Kennedy,” he told one of his girls. “Round-trip, return open. Call United first, but check the movie for me before you make it firm. Then call the Plaza in New York or, if they’re full, the Pierre. Tell them just overnight.”

  He didn’t have to worry about packing. He had a bag packed and ready in his office. There were two suits in it, plus shirts and socks and underwear and a full complement of toilet articles. There was also a pair of throwing knives, a strip of very thin, very strong steel, and a small-caliber automatic pistol.

  The girl looked up from the phone. “Oh, Lou,” she said, “was that first-class or tourist? I don’t think you said.”

  “Oh, make it first-class,” he told her. “They give us a discount.”

  SIX

  By the time Murdock got back to his rooming house Tuesday night, he couldn’t have told a telegram from a turbojet. He was in Minneapolis working on and off for a firm of short-haul movers, and he had spent most of that day moving a family from a third-floor apartment on Horatio to a fourth-floor apartment just three blocks away on Van Duyzen. One stairwell was worse than the other, and they had a baby grand piano that was a bitch on wheels. By the time he was through, a beer sounded like one fine idea. After a half dozen bottles of Hamm’s it seemed like an even better idea to switch to something a mite more powerful. He woke up with vague memories of a fight in one place and of dragging ass when the owner called the cops, and then going over to some other place that some good old boy knew about and starting in all over again. Somewhere along the line he evidently decided to pack it in and head for home, and damned if he hadn’t found his way, but he couldn’t remember that part of it at all.

  He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He tried to remember if he had told the boss he would be coming to work that day. It didn’t make such a much whether he did or not, because fish would fly before he’d show up at that moving company, but if they were expecting him, it meant he’d be out a job. Or maybe he wouldn’t; most of the moving companies took what they could get and didn’t expect you to be reliable. Which was good news, because if there was one thing Ben Murdock wasn’t, reliable is what it was.

  He was just created to raise hell, a lanky redneck with hair like straw and a mean streak that just had to pop out now and again. If he stood in the sun, freckles popped out on his face and forearms, and if he stood anywhere for any length of time, sun or shade, the meanness popped out the same way and he was ace-high certain to buy trouble for himself. He grew up in Tennessee and got thrown out of school over and over again, and when he was nineteen, he had to take off and drive up to Chicago because of a difference of opinion with a girl. His opinion was that she was sort of in the mood no matter what she said, and her opinion was that he had raped her. When she made her opinion known to the police, he borrowed himself a car and pointed it north.

  They never did get him for the car he borrowed, but within a month they picked him up for drinking after hours. He did the drinking in the middle of State Street and he got the liquor by putting his foot through the store window. The judge gave him a suspended sentence.

  He was in jail twice, Cook County Jail, ten days and then twenty, both times for drunk and disorderly. A little bit after he got out, he borrowed another car and cracked it up, and another judge gave him a choice b
etween the Army and Joliet. He took the Army because he figured it would be a sight easier to bust out of.

  He stayed in for fifteen years. They tried to bust his ass in basic and they just couldn’t do it, but while they were working on it something happened and they made a good soldier out of him. He made squad leader, he made Expert Rifleman. Somebody told him that they gave you double pay in the Paratroops, and he told him to shove it because all the money in the world wouldn’t get him to jump out of a plane. Then one of his bunkmates said that the Paratroops were the toughest outfit in the service, and that all they got lately was colored boys because no white man would stand up to it. He thought about that for a day and night, and the morning after that he went in and volunteered for the Paratroops.

  He went Special Forces first time it was offered. He made corporal eight times and was busted back down eight times, but he never did anything bad enough to earn him a discharge or a stretch of stockade time. Just something about that old Army, he fit and he belonged and it was more a home to him than Tennessee ever was and not to say Chicago. He reckoned they would kill him sooner or later, but he also reckoned he’d stay with it until they did.

  Until one day on a patrol when he made the mistake of getting in a sniper’s sights and the sniper made the mistake of putting two hunks of lead in Murdock’s left arm and missing the rest of him altogether. After they patched him up, he asked when he could rejoin his unit. They told him he had a million-dollar wound, a pin in his shoulder and another pin in his elbow, and that was the last he and the Army would be seeing of each other.

  They told him he was a hero and he’d get a pension and he should be happy. He wasn’t happy. He couldn’t figure why the sniper couldn’t either do the job right or miss him altogether, because now he was just sure to go on back and buy himself some trouble. Just a couple of pissant steel pins that he never so much as knew were there unless it was raining, and for that they took him and chucked him out of his home after fifteen years.

  He got up from the bed, went over to the washbowl, and rinsed some of the sour taste out of his mouth. When he turned to reach for a towel, he saw the telegram lying alongside the door. He knew what it was right away. He opened it and it was the usual message: COME HOME AT ONCE YOUR MOTHER IS DEAD. PA. The colonel didn’t like sending that message, but Murdock insisted on it. If there was one person on earth he purely hated, it was his mother. It surely tickled him to get that telegram.

  He looked in his pants pockets. He had a five-dollar bill left and a couple of ones, and there was a handful of change on the dresser. He got his knife and pried up the linoleum in one corner of the room. His travel money was still there, five hundred-dollar bills and two tens. That was one thing he never touched was his travel money, no matter how drunk he got or how broke he was. Not unless the colonel sent him that wire, which was what that particular money was reserved for.

  He went across the hall to the bathroom, took himself a shower, went back to his room, and put on his best clothes. He polished his good shoes with the bath towel.

  He left everything else in the room. The landlady could keep them or throw them out, her choice. He could care less. He was going back to where he belonged, with the good old boys who liked to move out and all the same as he did. Old Rugged Cross with his legs gone, and Eddie and Frank and the skinny dago and the nigger captain, and by God he was going to have himself some fun.

  SEVEN

  The colonel waited patiently while Helen Tremont wheeled the tea cart around the oval oak table, serving mugs of coffee and wedges of Danish pastry to each of the five men. When she left the room, he leaned forward, his arms on the table before him.

  He said, “Albert Platt. Born September four, nineteen twenty-one, in Brooklyn. Raised in the Brownsville and East New York sections of that borough. Arrested nineteen thirty-six for auto theft, served six months in Chatworth Reformatory. Nineteen thirty-eight to forty-one, arrested five times on charges ranging from simple assault to rape. Charges dropped for lack of evidence. Inducted into the armed forces in nineteen forty-two, dishonorably discharged later that same year. Arrested nineteen forty-four, assault with a deadly weapon. Charges dropped. Arrested nineteen forty-six, homicide. Witnesses refused to testify. Arrested nineteen forty-eight, homicide. Witness mysteriously disappeared, charges dropped.”

  The colonel sipped at his coffee. “No arrests since nineteen forty-eight,” he said. “Until that date Platt operated primarily in Brooklyn and Long Island. In nineteen forty-eight he moved across the river to New Jersey. He established a connection with a group of New Jersey racketeers, including Philip Longostini, known to intimates as Phil the Lobster. Longostini’s interests included several restaurants and nightclubs in Bergen County, two suburban garbage collection services, a vending machine corporation, two bowling alleys, and a chain of laundry and dry-cleaning establishments. He was also reputed to control bookmaking and loan shark operations in northern New Jersey, and wielded unofficial power in at least three labor unions.

  “By nineteen fifty-two Platt had established himself as Longostini’s chief enforcer—I believe that’s the term?” He looked for confirmation to Manso, who nodded. “Platt’s activities in this capacity were not such as to lead to his arrest, but it would seem that at least a dozen acts of murder were carried out either by him or under his orders.” The colonel placed the tips of his fingers together and looked thoughtfully at them. “I have read that one should be pleased when criminals turn to legitimate enterprise, that this will in some mysterious way effect their reform. This is a witless notion. The only result is that the enterprise itself becomes illegitimate. For that matter, I have read that crime does not pay and that criminals come to a bad end. Philip Longostini’s bad end came in July of nineteen sixty-four at his four-acre estate in Englewood Cliffs. He died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-three and left an estate estimated at . . . well, this is immaterial, isn’t it?”

  The colonel’s eyes worked their way around the table, focusing in turn upon Murdock and Dehn and Simmons and Giordano and Manso. He said, “Edward?”

  “Sir?”

  “The photographs.”

  Manso passed him a large Manila envelope. The colonel opened the clasp and withdrew half a dozen 8-by-11 photos. “Edward was able to take these in Las Vegas,” he said. “Albert Platt appears in each. In this photograph you will note the man immediately on Platt’s right. Edward?”

  “Buddy Rice. He drives Platt’s car and bodyguards him.”

  “I believe you said he carries a gun.”

  Manso nodded. “A forty-five in a shoulder rig. He’s also supposed to be very good with a knife.”

  Dehn said, “You got all this in Vegas?”

  “I spent a day asking a few questions.”

  “He get any kind of a make on you?”

  “I don’t think so. We were at the same crap table once, but between the broad on his arm and the trouble the dice were giving him I don’t think he paid any attention to me.”

  The colonel waited until the photos made their way around the table and returned to him. He gathered them up and put them back in the envelope. He drank more coffee, set the cup down empty. “So much for the background,” he said “You’ll want to take detailed notes from here on in.” He waited while the five uncapped pens and opened pocket notebooks. “Platt did not take over all of Longostini’s operations,” he began. “You’ll understand that the newspapers were vague on this, but my sister has become rather adept at research. She went beyond the usual coverage and pieced out details from the accounts of several senatorial investigations. Platt seems to be in direct control of approximately a third of organized criminal activity in Bergen County and the surrounding area. His income from legitimate sources alone is quite high. He lives in a pre-Revolutionary estate on four acres of land just south of Tenafly. The grounds are walled off and patrolled by armed guards. Rumors circulate that associates of his who have disappeared over the years are buried in wooded
areas of the estate.

  “But that, too, is largely immaterial. More to the point, Platt has broadened and extended the scope of his operations. As I said, he did not take over completely upon Longostini’s death. He gave up gambling interests in return for full control of loan shark activities. And, early in nineteen sixty-six, he widened his interests to include the banking business. It was at that time that he acquired control of the Passaic Bank of Commerce and Industry.”

  Simmons said, “With a criminal record?”

  “His control is unofficial. The president of the bank is Jerome Gegner, who has no criminal record. Gegner’s former employment includes a stint as manager of the Thirty-Thirty Club in Paterson. He also served as vice-president and treasurer of Harco Automatic Vending, Inc. Both of these firms were originally owned by Philip Longostini. Members of the board of directors of the Passaic Bank of Commerce and Industry include several other known associates of Platt’s. One of them is surprisingly young to be a bank director. His name is Silvertree. Oddly enough, he happens to be married to Albert Platt’s niece.”

  The colonel paused to give the note-takers a chance to catch up. Some of them, he knew, would be able to read back his words almost verbatim. Dehn and Simmons were like this. Murdock, on the other hand, would write down almost nothing, preferring to rely on his memory.

  “Banking and finance seems an odd choice for Platt,” he said at length. “When Eddie brought this whole matter up, my first reaction was that Platt must be the organizer or financier of a gang of robbers. The idea of criminal interests actually owning a bank did not even occur to me. Since then I’ve learned more about criminal resourcefulness. It seems Platt was only following a current trend in gangster circles. As long ago as nineteen sixty, men like Platt have sought out banks with a rather poor profit picture, banks that may be acquired with little difficulty. There are several banks in the Chicago area that are known to be under mob control, along with one on Long Island and several others in various parts of the country.