The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  Manso straightened his cap. It was navy blue with a glossy plastic peak, and the badge on it said WELLS FARGO. Manso had bought the cap in a surplus store in Tenafly. He found the badge in the toy department at Kresge’s. The cap cost $1.69. The badge was supposed to cost 29¢, but there was a line at the cash register, so he just put it in his pocket.

  Now he said, “Look, it’s only a job with me. I get my orders.”

  “So do I, fella.”

  “So I’ll just go back and tell the boss I couldn’t get through to Platt, and he’ll get on the phone, and you can explain to him why you never even bothered to let him know I was here.”

  The other guard wagged the rifle at Manso. “You beat it,” he said. “You just get the hell——”

  “Hold it, Jack. I’ll call, it can’t hurt.”

  He picked up a phone. Manso didn’t try to hear the conversation. The guard put a hand over the mouthpiece. “He says is it from Lucarelli or what?”

  “Nobody told me a name.”

  The guard was on the phone for a few more seconds. Then he told Manso to get out of the car.

  “I got to frisk you,” he said “Then we walk up to the house. The car stays here.”

  “Sure.”

  The frisk was cursory. The guard never even touched Manso’s arms. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did; the knife was now taped to the sole of his shoe. They walked together up the curving driveway to the house. The guard didn’t say anything and neither did Manso. He had a manila envelope in one hand, a receipt book in the other.

  Platt was waiting in the entrance hall. The man at his side was built like a fireplug. Platt said, “Okay, kid, go ahead,” and the guard left the house. To Manso, Platt said, “What is this crap that I gotta sign for some letter?”

  “Just doing my job, Mr. Platt.”

  “Yeah. Well, hand it over.” Manso gave him the envelope and Platt looked at it without opening it, then thrust it into a pocket. “Now gimme your pad.”

  “You have to read it first, Mr. Platt.”

  “I have to what?”

  Manso nodded. “What I was told. You have to sign that you received the letter and read it.”

  “Who the hell sent this?”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  He held his breath while Platt tore the end off the envelope, drew out the single sheet of paper. He looked at Platt, then at the man next to him, watching one for his reaction while estimating the force and speed of the other. The heavy didn’t look too bad, but Platt was a study. His face ran through a full range of emotions, registering surprise and shock and irritation and anger.

  He said, “Okay, kid. Who’s this from?”

  “Me.”

  “You sent it yourself?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the crap with the messenger outfit?”

  “Just to get past the gate.”

  “What the hell do you know about Buddy?”

  “I listen close, I hear things.”

  Platt turned to the fireplug. “Get this. ‘Mr. Platt: I am your new bodyguard and chauffeur. I can do anything Buddy Rice could do. Also I’m alive and he isn’t.’ I’ll be a son of a bitch.” To Manso he said, “Just who the hell do you think you are?”

  “It says in the letter. Your new bodyguard,”

  “Somebody put you up to this?”

  “No. My own idea.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not the best one you ever had. The job’s taken, punk. Now get your ass out of here.”

  Manso nodded at the bodyguard. “Who’s he?”

  “His name’s Buddy. Scram, punk.”

  “Another Buddy?” He straightened, rested his weight on the balls of his feet. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Platt. You want me to go, tell Buddy here to throw me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he can’t.”

  Platt stared at him, then suddenly grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you do that thing, Buddy. Throw the punk out. You want to mess him up a little while you’re at it, you go ahead.”

  Buddy hadn’t shown any expression until then. Now he came close to a smile. His hand dipped inside his jacket and came out with a gun in it. “Out,” he said. “Now.”

  “Jesus, take it easy! No problem!” Manso’s eyes were wide with terror, and his hands went up in surrender, and as they did his right foot also went up in the air. Buddy was still looking at the hands and the eyes when Manso’s foot caught his hand and sent the gun looping overhead.

  Manso snatched the gun out of the air and pointed it at Platt.

  And everybody froze.

  “Bad,” Manso said. “Very bad. I’ll tell you, Mr. Platt, I heard good things about the other Buddy, but this one stinks on ice. Anybody who can’t even hold onto a gun deserves what he gets. But the main thing is a bodyguard doesn’t stand like a lump when somebody waves a gun at the body he’s supposed to be guarding. Now what I would have done, Mr. Platt, is thrown myself between you and the gun.”

  Platt was nodding.

  “And then, when I was in the way, I’d have rushed the gun. But standing like a lump, that’s no good at all.”

  Gleason said, “Mr. Platt, all this prick is is tricky.”

  Manso ignored him. “And another thing,” he said. “If my boss told me to throw somebody out, and the somebody was mouthing off that he could do my job better than I could, well, Mr. Platt, I wouldn’t toss him out by waving a gun at him. I would want to make a good impression in front of my boss and show how good I could be without a gun.” He turned the smile on Gleason. “You want another try, Buddy?” He turned and put the gun on a table behind him. “Ready when you are, tiger.”

  Buddy blew his cool. Manso had played him to do just that, and he was ready for it. Buddy came straight on with his arms out and his head down, and Manso leaned to the left and jabbed the bunched fingers of his right hand into Buddy’s diaphragm.

  Buddy doubled up and collapsed. He couldn’t get his breath. Manso smiled at him.

  “Now tell Mr. Platt you resign, Buddy.”

  Buddy caught his breath and got to his feet. His hand went inside his jacket again and Manso hoped it wasn’t another gun and that he could be fast enough if it was. But it was a knife, a switchblade stiletto. Buddy held it low, blade up. He came on in a crouch, arms out in front, eyes wary.

  “Now that’s better,” Manso said. “That gives me a chance to look good, Buddy. I appreciate it.”

  Buddy watched Manso’s eyes. That’s usually enough, but in this case it was a mistake and Buddy should have known better. He already knew Manso was good. With a good man, you forget the eyes and watch the feet. A good man feints with his eyes.

  Manso glanced one way and moved another, and Buddy thrust with the knife and cut empty air. Manso had moved to his right, turning inward as he did so, and his right elbow dug into Buddy’s solar plexus. Manso’s left had fastened on Buddy’s wrist while his right hand caught the man’s arm just above the elbow.

  Manso put his knee behind the elbow, applied pressure against the joint. The switchblade dropped to the floor.

  He said, “He really stinks, Mr. Platt.”

  “Yeah. He does.”

  “Whether you hire me or not, Mr. Platt, you sure don’t want him working for you. He’s just no damned good.”

  “He’s fired.”

  “Maybe he wants to resign. Buddy, tell Mr. Platt you quit.”

  Buddy didn’t say anything. Manso increased the pressure and repeated the order. Buddy was shaking, and saliva dripped from a corner of his mouth.

  “I quit!”

  “Jesus,” Platt said.

  “You need him for anything at all, Mr. Platt? You got any further use for him?”

  “I wouldn’t let him take out the garbage.”

  “Well, then,” Manso said, and broke Buddy’s arm at the elbow.

  He took Buddy outside, dropped him alongside the front entrance. He felt loose and cool. The conversational mannerisms he had adopted seemed
to help; as long as he stayed in character it was easy to ride with the play. One thing was sure. He was absolute hell on Buddies.

  When he got back in the entrance hall, Platt had the gun in his hand. It was pointed at Manso, and for an instant he thought he was going to be shot. He came perilously close to panic.

  “I surrender,” he said lightly.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Edward. I suppose I’ll have to change it to Buddy, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I think it’s a bad luck name.”

  Platt’s mouth tightened. “You were very good there. You’re as fast as I’ve seen.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Shut up when I’m talking. You’re fast, and you played a long shot and you think it came in, and you’re busy being cocky. You don’t want to do that. I could shoot you right now and bury you in back. I could have you tied up and let half a dozen guys take turns with you until you told ’em things you didn’t even know you knew. You get the picture?”

  “Yes, Mr. Platt.”

  “I seen you somewheres. Where?”

  “Vegas. The Desert Palms.”

  “You were out there? Why?”

  “To have a look at you.”

  “For who?”

  “For myself.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted Buddy’s job.”

  “Oh, cut the shit.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Did you kill Buddy?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know, but for my money you just answered the question. You said yes to it. What’s your angle?”

  “I want Buddy’s job.”

  “Why? God damn it, who are you?”

  Manso hesitated.

  “You said a name before.”

  “Edward.”

  “And a last name?”

  Manso looked at the rug.

  “You want Buddy’s job but you won’t even tell your name?”

  “I didn’t want it to go like this,” Manso said quietly. “I thought I could start out working for you and then we could see where it went I thought I could——”

  “See where what went?”

  Manso sighed, then raised his eyes to meet Platt’s. “I thought my name was Edward Mann, Mr. Platt. For years I grew up thinking that was my name, that was me, Eddie Mann.”

  “So?”

  “Well, now it looks as though my name isn’t Mann after all. I’ve been trying to check on it, but I can’t get anywhere one way or the other. See, the way it looks, the last name ought to be Platt.”

  He swallowed. “Don’t expect me to prove it,” he went on. “I can’t even prove it to myself. But well, you see, I think maybe I’m your son.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Her name was Florence Mannheim, but she cut it to Mann when I was still in diapers. That was the same time that we moved out to Astoria.”

  “From where?”

  “East New York. When she told me all this, when I started to check things out, I found out we lived on Pitkin Avenue. I went over and looked at the building. Nobody lives there now. All the windows broken, the door kicked in.”

  “Pitkin Avenue,” Platt said.

  “She always told me my father was dead. He died in the war, she said. Before I was born. She said his name was Edward like mine and he was in the Air Force and his plane was shot down over Germany. I checked that, too, and there was no record he ever existed. And Mannheim was her maiden name. She was never married, at least not in New York. There’s no record of it anywhere. So I don’t know if you’re my father or not, but whoever it was, he wasn’t married to my mother.”

  “Florence Mannheim,” Platt said. He was no longer holding the gun. “This is crazy. I never had a son.”

  “She said she never told you about me.”

  “I never heard of a Florence Mannheim.”

  “She said you probably wouldn’t even remember her. It was hard for me to follow her. She was dying. I was just back from the service and she was dying and she said she had to tell me something, and I said to just take it easy, just rest, and she sat up and started telling me that there was no Edward Mannheim and that my father was a man named Albert Platt. She said she went out on the Island and had me at a nursing home and the birth was never registered. I’ve never been able to get hold of my birth certificate. When I was sixteen, I had trouble getting a driver’s license. I had to go to the school for proof of age.”

  Platt’s eyes were half-lidded, his brow ridged. “You’re how old?”

  “Twenty-eight in February.”

  “So that’s when? Forty-one?”

  “Right. I would have been conceived in nineteen forty, say late May or early June.”

  “I’m trying to place this. A son. I never thought about kids, and then by the time I wanted one . . . I remember I picked up some kind of crazy dose. There was this Spanish kid infected half of Brooklyn. What we didn’t do to her afterwards, Christ you can bet she never clapped anybody else.” Platt laughed, then was suddenly sober again. “Couple of years ago I went to a doctor. Specialist. He said that could have been what did it, that I can’t have kids now. When the hell was that? I guess forty-two or three.”

  Thank God for that, Manso thought.

  “May or June of nineteen forty. This is crazy, you’re either a wise-ass punk or you’re my kid, I don’t know which. This is hard to get used to. Those years I was a nutty kid myself practically. Nineteen forty. I was what? Jesus, I was nineteen.”

  “My mother was seventeen.”

  “Nineteen years old. Those days I would screw anything.” Platt smiled at the memory. “We were wild kids. They used to say I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head. What was it she told you? We had a thing going or what?”

  “She said just once.”

  “One time?” Platt snorted. “How’s she so sure I was the hero?”

  “You were the only one. She said you forced her.”

  “You mean raped her?”

  “She didn’t exactly say.”

  “Yeah.” Platt nodded slowly. “There were so many of them in those days. You’d pick up a girl and feed her a little booze and never see her again. Half the time you never knew their last names. Florence, there were lots of girls with that name where I lived. Only generally they were called Flo. Now it’s not such a common name. What did she die of?”

  “Cancer.”

  “That’s a bitch, all right. Flo Mannheim? I can’t make any connections. What did she look like? What color hair?”

  “Sort of a light brown.”

  “And yours is dark. And the same as mine, isn’t it? I’m a son of a bitch if this isn’t the damnedest thing ever. I mean it’s crazy.”

  Manso nodded “It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since she told me. Either I have a father or I don’t, and I can’t prove it one way or the other. That’s why I was sort of following you around.”

  “Checking on me?”

  “Right. I nosed around here a little and then when I found out you were in Vegas, I flew out there and had a closer look. I stayed at the same place. I was right next to you at the crap table one night.”

  “You gamble much?”

  “Some.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “I won a little.”

  “Me, I took a bath. But what the hell, it’s a vacation, you don’t care. I got to sit down and think about this. You hungry? You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Coffee would be fine.”

  “Come on. Eddie is what they call you, huh? Eddie Platt. You know, you’re a good-looking kid, and the way you handled that punk. Style. That’s one thing I always had even as a kid, I had style. Who taught you to handle yourself like that? You learn it in the service?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, come on inside, we’ll sit and have coffee.”

  Giordano sat in his car reading the resort and travel section of the Sunday Times. The newsst
and got all the back sections a day early, and the newsie had told him he could stop in the following morning for the news sections. Giordano didn’t think he would bother.

  He was reading an article on new travel opportunities in Bulgaria. None of his customers had ever wanted to go to Bulgaria. It was not very likely, he thought, that any of them ever would. Giordano wanted to go there, though. Giordano wanted to go anyplace he’d never been.

  He looked up, realizing he’d read the same paragraph three times over and had retained none of it. He propped the paper against the steering wheel and leaned back. His car was parked at a shopping plaza a mile and three-quarters from the Platt estate. The homing device that Simmons had attached to Platt’s Lincoln had an effective range of five miles, and the receiver on the seat next to Giordano was turned all the way up. But there was no sound coming out of it.

  The beeper was the type used by police to pinpoint the location of a moving car. In order to do that effectively, you had to have three receiving units in operation, using three cars in radio contact to triangulate on the car under surveillance. They only had one receiver, but it was really all they needed. Simmons had planted the homing device with the switch turned off. When Manso turned it on, that meant he was planted and all systems were go.

  If he didn’t turn it on—

  A muscle worked in Giordano’s cheek. It was almost five now. Manso had gone inside at three. About that time Giordano took up his post at the shopping plaza, and a little later Simmons and Murdock had shown up to pass on the film cartridges and let him know the beeper was in place. All Giordano could do was wait.

  He glared at the receiver. When it beeped, he had to scoot out to Tarrytown to develop Murdock’s films and have a look at Dehn’s sketches, and it would have to be a quick look at that because he had a date with Patricia at 8:30, and while he didn’t expect to be on time, he didn’t want to keep her waiting too long. The more time he spent at the shopping plaza, the closer he would have to cut things, which was aggravating. Worse, the more time passed without a signal from Manso, the more chance there was that there wouldn’t ever be a signal from Manso.

  Suppose, he thought, somebody took the car out. Five miles wasn’t all that far. All Platt had to do was send somebody out for groceries and he’d be hung up waiting for a signal that couldn’t come. Of course if the car was gone—that didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. It could mean, for example, that Eddie was doubled up in the trunk and they were taking him for a ride to the swamp.