The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  He drove another half mile down the road to a gas station. The pay phone was set up for direct-dialing. He dropped a dime in the slot and called Tarrytown.

  Giordano hung the last of the prints up to dry. There were sixteen of them and almost all of them had come out sharp and clear. His camera was a Japanese job about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and he had loaded it with a very fast film. He studied the pictures now and was reasonably pleased with them. He had enlarged the negatives to four-by-five, and could have made them still larger without too much loss of definition, but he felt they would do.

  He poured his trays of chemicals down the sink and went upstairs. Helen Tremont was at the kitchen table reading a magazine. “Oh, Louis,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come up. You walk like a cat.”

  “I hope I didn’t startle you——”

  “Not at all.” She smiled. “You’re finished already? That was fast, wasn’t it.”

  “The darkroom’s a pleasure to work in.”

  “Yes, Walter spent hours on end down there. You’ve seen his nature photographs. He did some marvelous things. He always said it was the only hunting he cared for. Do you do very much photography yourself?”

  “Not anymore. I did for a few months, but then I realized I had a cabinet full of prints that I never looked at once I’d developed and printed them, and I sort of lost interest.”

  “I suppose that can happen.”

  “And I wasn’t an artist at it. I got to be competent, and then I never got to be anything better than competent, so from that point on it got dull for me. The only part I ever really enjoyed was the darkroom work. That’s still a kick, you know, putting the film through the bath and seeing what you come up with. This batch turned out fine.”

  “Roger will be glad to hear that. He’s upstairs, if you want to go up. Oh, what’s wrong with me? You’ll have a drink?”

  “I’d like some coffee, if there’s any made.”

  He stayed with her and drank the coffee in the kitchen. They talked about hobbies and travel, but Giordano had trouble keeping his mind on the conversation. When he was done with the coffee, he went up to the second floor and found the colonel in the library.

  “The prints are drying,” he said. “They came out fine.”

  “Good. I just spoke to Frank. He opened his account with no difficulty and managed to lease a safe deposit box. He had a look at the vault. No photographs, of course.”

  “His memory’s almost as good as a camera.”

  “Yes. He’ll be here sometime this evening to go over the photos with you. And Howard was on the phone earlier. They hope to get on the ground of the Platt estate tomorrow. They’ve laid the groundwork and should have something for us tomorrow night if all goes well.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh . . . as far as this evening is concerned——”

  “Yes?”

  Giordano hesitated. “Well, I did make a dinner date with one of the tellers. I don’t have to show up if you think it’s more important to meet with Frank tonight, but I thought it might be worthwhile to develop that contact. She’s just a teller, of course, but she might know a lot about bank routine.”

  “Yes, of course.” The colonel turned away for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. “A dinner date,” he said suddenly. “You only went there to change a bill, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, a twenty.”

  “And it was crowded, and of course the girl must have been rushed.”

  “Yes, sir, she was.”

  “And you still managed to date her?”

  “Well . . . ”

  The colonel chuckled softly. “I see,” he said. “I gather you’ll be spending the night in New Jersey, then?”

  Giordano fought against the rush of blood to his face. It was bad enough to be short and skinny and nearsighted. Why the hell did he have to blush? “She seems like a quiet sort of girl,” he said. “I don’t know, I mean, I——”

  The colonel spun his chair back, wheeled himself over to his desk. “I think you’re quite right, Louis. You should develop this relationship. A dinner date, you won’t have very much time, will you? I could call Frank and suggest he make it tomorrow. No, that’s not good. Will those prints be dry by the time you’re ready to leave?”

  “Easily.”

  “Good. Bring them up before you go, and I’ll go over them with you so that I know what they are. Then Frank and I can work together on them. I think that should do well enough. You’ll have a look at his scale drawing tomorrow. Just give me a call when you know where you’ll be staying.”

  “The Cavalier Motel on U.S. One.”

  “Oh?” The colonel raised an eyebrow. “Did you take the room before you met the girl or after? You don’t have to answer that, Louis.”

  Giordano blushed furiously. “I’ll check those prints,” he said, and fled from the room.

  TEN

  Manso started out at six thirty. He went to four restaurants on the list and had a drink at each of them. He drank Bloody Marys because he could drink them almost indefinitely without feeling the vodka they contained. He nursed each drink for about fifteen minutes, then left and drove the rented Plymouth to the next place on the list.

  After four restaurants and four drinks he was hungry. The fourth restaurant was a steakhouse in Clifton named for the ex-prizefighter who functioned as its maitre d’hôtel. Photos of other fighters covered the wall behind the bar. There were elaborately framed oils of boxing matches in the dining room, and the menu featured such items as Jake LaMotta Open Tenderloin Sandwich and Fried Chicken à la Sugar Ray Robinson. There was also a Jersey Joe Walcott Special, which turned out to be a combination of lobster tail and sirloin.

  The fighter didn’t own the restaurant. Like the three others on Manso’s list, it was one of Albert Platt’s places. He didn’t really expect Platt to show up, but it seemed worth a try. From what he had seen of Platt in Vegas, he had a taste for night life and enjoyed being seen. Most gangsters liked to show up at their own restaurants.

  Manso knew a lot about gangsters. When they flew him back to the States, he had close to three grand in his pocket and he took the whole roll straight to Vegas. He won the first three nights straight and had the feeling that he had found the only sensible way in the world to make a living. The fourth night he stepped up to the crap table of the Sands with $8,500 on his hip. By midnight he had run it up to twenty thousand, and at a quarter to three in the morning he had a fifty-dollar bill in his shoe and no chips at all in front of him.

  An assistant manager bought him breakfast, told him to forget his hotel bill, and bought him a bus ticket to L.A. Manso cashed the ticket at the bus station. He took a five-a-week room in downtown Vegas and got a job in an automatic car wash. He spent every night at the downtown casinos. He played as small as he could and never lost more than five dollars in a night. Most of the time he watched.

  He ate out of cans and saved his money. He talked to people, he read books. He thought things out very carefully, and he finally concluded that you couldn’t beat the tables, but he kept going to the casinos and watching the play and betting nickels and dimes while making larger bets in his mind. After a few more months he changed his mind. You could beat the tables, but only if you had three things. You needed the knowledge and the capital and, most important of all, the attitude.

  Even so, you weren’t likely to beat the casinos’ brains out. But you could learn to tune yourself in, could develop the knack of sensing when your luck was coming so that you could ride the hot streaks and go home the instant they cooled. You couldn’t get rich that way, but if you had a thick enough bankroll, you could do about well enough to live fairly well without working for a living.

  It took Manso a long time to save a thousand dollars. When he hit that figure, he was ready. He went back to the Sands. He was in the casino for eighteen hours straight. He would make small bets at the crap table, waiting for the feeling to come, and when it didn’t, he would kill time at a nickel slot machine
waiting for the mood to shift. At three in the afternoon, after sixteen hours, he was about three hundred dollars ahead. He was also out of nickels, so he moved on down the line to a quarter machine, dropped in his only quarter, and caught the jackpot on the first shot.

  He went straight to the crap table and pushed his luck straight up to five thousand dollars. He couldn’t do a thing wrong. When his roll stood at five grand, he had the dice rattling in his hand and a thousand of his dollars on the table, a limit bet on the pass line and another on the eight. He was set to roll when something happened inside his head, some message reached him, and he held up in midroll and pulled both bets back and dropped a five-dollar chip on the Don’t Come line.

  “You’re betting against yourself,” the croupier said.

  The dice came up ace-deuce craps. He cashed in five thousand and five dollars. He settled his bill from before and reimbursed the assistant manager for the bus ticket. He was on the next plane to Los Angeles. When the colonel called him, he was working on an assembly line at an aircraft factory and thinking about getting back in the service.

  There was never any question in his mind about what to do with the proceeds from the first job they pulled. He had acquired two of the three necessities earlier, the knowledge and the attitude, and now he had the requisite capital. Now, with all of that cash in his kick, it didn’t really matter whether he won or lost.

  Since then he lived the ideal life. He drifted from Vegas to Puerto Rico to Nassau and back again. Sometimes he went to Europe, but the casinos there didn’t have it for him. Everything was too formal, too stuffy. He liked the life in the American casinos. Plush, wellstaffed hotels, the best night life in the world, beautiful and eager women, fine food, and action whenever he was in the mood. He won a little more than he lost, and when his luck went sour, he knew enough to stay away from the tables. He didn’t need twenty-four hours a day of gambling. There were enough other things that he liked about the life.

  The one thing he didn’t like was the gangsters. You couldn’t have gambling without them, it seemed. They were all over Vegas and the Caribbean. Manso knew some of them enough to nod to and others enough to drink with, and they knew him for a right bettor who didn’t leave much on their tables but who rarely hurt them, either. They thought he was all right He thought they were garbage, but he didn’t let them know it.

  Now, at Platt’s restaurant, he carried the remains of his Bloody Mary to a table in the back. He ordered a rare sirloin and a salad and wondered if Platt would show up.

  Manso was on his second cup of coffee when the gangster walked in. There were three others in his party. The other man with him was half a head taller than Platt and weighed fifty pounds less. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes deeply sunken, and he walked with his arms tight against his body and a look of incipient death in his eyes. The two girls were blondes in their late twenties, and Manso thought they looked hired. He watched Platt’s girl and wondered if he had played the revolver trick on her.

  He finished his coffee and signaled for the check. While he was waiting for his change he saw Buddy Rice at the door. At once he dropped his eyes, rested his forehead on one hand as if in thought. Platt had looked his way twice and had shown no recognition. Platt, though, would not be apt to recognize him; Rice, bodyguard and seeing-eye dog, was supposed to scan rooms his master entered and place the faces he found in them.

  Manso raised his eyes again. Buddy was alone at a table on the far wall, positioned so that he could keep an eye on Platt’s table. The waiter brought Manso’s change. He left an unremarkable tip. When the welterweight-turned-headwaiter went over to talk to Buddy Rice, Manso got to his feet and left the restaurant.

  On the pavement he lit a cigarette and walked off to the left. Rice had come into the restaurant almost five minutes after Platt. He had parked the car, obviously. Manso walked on past the restaurant’s parking lot. There was an attendant on duty, a stringy kid in an ill-fitting uniform. But did he park the cars himself or just stand guard? Manso crossed the street at the corner, came back halfway on the other side, and waited. After a few minutes a car pulled in and the boy parked it.

  So Rice had dropped them off. Then he must have gone on around the block to the lot entrance, where he turned the car over to the kid.

  But when it was time to pick up the car, Rice wouldn’t have to drive around the block. For that matter, there was a fair possibility that Platt and his party would walk the few yards to the lot entrance with him. Whether they did or not, there was no room for Manso to make his play.

  He stood in a doorway for a few moments, thinking it out. Then he walked to his own car, parked on the street around the corner. He drove halfway around the block and parked the Plymouth in front of an unlit house.

  Another house two doors down was backed up against the restaurant’s parking lot. Manso shucked his jacket and tie, left them in the car. He changed his black oxfords for tennis shoes and slipped noiselessly up the driveway and through the backyard. The lawn was soggy from a full afternoon of sprinkling. When a light went on in the rear of the house, he dropped flat on the wet grass, and for a thin moment he was back in Bolivia on an antiguerrilla patrol with high swamp grass bunched under him and the chatter of the guerrillas, a mongrel Indio-Spanish, rattling on either side of him. The light went out. He stayed where he was for another moment or two, then got to his feet and moved silently to the fence.

  A bed of climber roses twining up a woven wire fence with the ends of the wire extending jagged above the top rail of the fence. The fence was chin-high, the mesh too dense for a foothold. He stripped to the waist, then put his shirt on again. His undershirt he rolled into a tight cylinder and placed on the top of the fence.

  Then he got down on his haunches and waited.

  ELEVEN

  The sign above the door said LIGHT OF FREEDOM BOOKS. In the display window there was a variety of hand-lettered signs bearing quotations from the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. Displayed along with a few dozen books were photographs of George Washington, Adolf Hitler, and a southern governor with presidential aspirations. A bumper sticker exhorted the reader to support his local police.

  Murdock studied the display with interest, then sauntered inside. A bell rang when he opened the door. Seconds later the proprietor emerged from the back. He wore a plaid cotton shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled past his elbows. A tattoo on one forearm read “My Mother & My Country.” My Gawd, Murdock thought.

  He said, “How do. Just passing by and I saw your window, reckoned I might stop in for a spell.”

  “Glad for the company,” the man said.

  Murdock sized him up. A tough old boy just a little gone to fat he decided, too much beer going down the gullet and making the gut hang out but a hard old boy for all of that.

  “Don’t see many places like this up here,” he said. “All them so-called liberals, you walk a long ways to see real folks.”

  The man smiled, but his eyes were wary. “Everybody thinks his own way,” he said. “Free country and all.”

  Hills, Murdock thought. Probably a down-home boy, but then it was hard to pin a voice too closely nowadays. You’d hear them talk about the same in parts of Ohio, even Indiana.

  “There’s free and there’s free,” he said. “Down home they taught us between crime in the streets and thinking as you please.”

  “You sure do talk southrun,” the man said.

  “Tennessee. Hamblen County.”

  “Hell, I know where that’s at.” The hill accent was more pronounced now, the wariness gone from the eyes. “Rutledge? No, that’s a county over, now. Morristown?”

  “That’s the county seat, all right. Now who’d ever figure someone this far north ever heard of Morristown, or Hamblen County either? Where I was, closest town was Russellville, and that was eight bad miles from us.”

  “Why, my folks aren’t a hundred miles from there. Clay County? In Kentucky, just straight north and a p
iece west? Town of Gooserock, not that anybody ever heard of it that wasn’t born in it.”

  “Don’t know the town, but I sure know Clay County. Damn, I been in Clay County.” He hesitated a polite moment, then extended his hand. “Hooker’s my name. They call me Ben.”

  “John Ray Jenkins. Ben, you know Clay County, then you know what Clay County’s rightly famous for. Now you hang on.”

  He went into the back room, came out again with a half-pint bottle about two-thirds full of white mule. They each had two drinks. Jenkins dropped the empty bottle into a trash basket.

  “Some summer,” Murdock said. “Hot already and hotter coming on, and you just know what’s gone to happen when the heat of the sun gets to working on those nappy heads.”

  “Hell, you don’t even want to talk that way in these parts,” Jenkins said. He hawked, spat. “Okay for a nigger to break windows and shoot up the town and all, but a white man ain’t supposed to take no notice of it or he’s discriminating against his colored brethren.”

  “Hear you had a bad summer last year.”

  “Bad! Yeah, you just might call it that.”

  Murdock studied the floor. “Had us a bunch of good old boys down home knew how to stick together. It’s a white man’s country. What am I telling you, hell, Gay County and Hamblen County, you know what I mean.”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Here, though. You don’t even know who you can talk to, what with everybody who ain’t a Nee-gro is some kind of Jew foreigner. Wouldn’t of opened up to you without I sort of got the message from the window. You want to know something? Here I’m living not two blocks from them and never knowing when a riot’s fit to bust out, and I can’t go to a store and buy myself a gun. Call that a free country?”

  “A free people has got a right to bear arms,” Jenkins said. “You read the Constitution, that’s right in there. Right to bear arms.”

  “Those do-gooders in Washington, what do they know about any Constitution?”