The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  NINETEEN

  “Hit him.”

  Manso tried to tense his stomach muscles, but he didn’t have anything left. He let his gut stay slack. The fist hammered into his midsection and he felt his gorge rising, tasted bile in the back of his throat. He was almost sick, but he managed to hold onto it.

  “You bastard. I take you in my house and you go with my wife. Hit him again.”

  The blow was the same as the last. All of them had been the same, delivered to Manso’s gut with monotonous regularity by one of the nightshift guards. Platt and two of the guards had dragged him out of his bed and down the basement stairs, and now he was tied to a pillar in a small empty windowless room. The guard was giving him a beating and Manso was taking it.

  “My son. If you ain’t my son, you’re dead. You hear?”

  He heard. His stomach was on fire, his legs rubber, his head pounding. Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t which was what he had suspected all along, because she was a crazy bitch who didn’t know what the hell she wanted, and there was just no right way to play it.

  “And if you are my son, then what? The son comes and screws the father’s wife. What kind of son is that?”

  The hell of it was that he hadn’t. He had passed her up and picked the coffee. I couldn’t do it, not my father’s wife—it had sounded phony even as he said it but at the time it seemed safer than throwing it to her.

  “Al, Mr. Platt, Dad——”

  “Listen to him, he don’t even know what to call me.”

  “It never happened. What she said, it never happened.”

  “So why does she lie? Why say she screwed you if she didn’t?”

  “Your money.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Your will,” he said, desperate. “She wants me dead, don’t you see? She wants you to kill me. She’s afraid otherwise you’ll split up your estate instead of leaving it all to her.”

  The guard braced himself for another blow. Platt laid a hand on his arm. “Hold it,” he said. “You go on back upstairs, kid. We don’t want to take it too far too fast, you know?”

  “Sure, Mr. Platt.”

  After the guard left, Platt went a long time without saying anything. Finally he said, “Both ways it’s solid enough. She could be telling the truth, and then you’re a wise ass working an angle who hustled her into the hay.”

  “Why would I take the chance?”

  “Because men think with their cocks instead of their heads. Especially at your age. But don’t interrupt. She could be telling it straight. Or she could be lying for the reason you said, the money, and then you’re telling it straight.” He paused. Then, “You know something? Only one thing matters.”

  Manso waited.

  “And that’s if you’re my son or not. If you’re my son, hell, blood’s blood. If there was a misunderstanding, we just call it a misunderstanding and the hell with it. If you’re not my son, if it’s either a story of yours or else your mother was off her nut, then you get planted in the backyard next to Buddy. Because if you’re not my kid, what the hell do I care who screwed who or who didn’t screw who and who’s lying and the rest of it. You follow me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow and the next day I’ll talk to some people and see what I can find out. I’ll tell them to fix it so you’re more comfortable, but you better figure on making do with this room for a couple of days. It used to be the coal cellar. When I bought the place, I put in a gas furnace right away. There was a chute behind you where the coal came in, I had them brick that up. I figured it would be handy, a nice solid room with no windows.” He laughed, then broke it off short. “Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “A couple of days and we’ll know, see? We can forget about all of this and the whole subject never comes up again. The hell, the door locks, you’re not going any place. I’ll cut you loose.”

  Manso steadied himself. Platt cut the ropes around his ankles and wrists. He was ready to spring at the man as soon as he was free, but he didn’t even get to try. As soon as the bonds were loose, his feet went out from under him and he slid down the length of the pillar and sprawled on the floor. He couldn’t move. He just didn’t have it.

  “Yeah. You rest and take it easy.”

  “I got a date.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A date,” Manso said. “This girl I’ve been trying to get to. I got a date with her for tomorrow night.”

  “We won’t have anything that quick.”

  “Call her for me? Just that Eddie can’t make it, so she doesn’t think I stood her up. Would you do that?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll give you the number,” he said. “Her name’s Helen Tremont.”

  TWENTY

  The colonel sat in his wheelchair and massaged the stumps of his legs. Both of them had ached ever since the phone call. It had come at eight o’clock. It was nine now, and they were all gathered in the library waiting for the colonel to speak, and all he could think was that his legs hurt. It was psychosomatic, and he knew it was psychosomatic, but somehow the knowledge did nothing whatsoever to alleviate the pain.

  He said, “It’s obvious that Eddie is in very serious trouble.”

  He circled the table with his eyes and studied the four faces. They gave back virtually nothing. He thought at first that they were impassive, stoic. Then he realized that it was something else. They were merely waiting for orders.

  But he was not yet ready for orders. He said, “At the very least, we are forced to assume that Eddie has been exposed. The illegitimate son facade was never designed to withstand long scrutiny. Eddie insisted that it had been completely successful, however, and felt it might be worthwhile to remain behind enemy lines until the last possible moment. Evidently he’s been found out.”

  “We have to get him out of there.”

  The colonel raised his eyes, sought out the speaker. “Howard?”

  “Sir. If Eddie’s in there with his cover blown, we have to get him out. And the sooner the better.”

  Dehn said, “This phone call. You said it was a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “But definitely not Eddie?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Meaning he conned someone into making the tipoff call. He could be dead already, sir.”

  The colonel nodded. His legs twinged, and he massaged the stumps again with his hands. He closed his eyes for a moment, absorbed in the pain, and considered the possibility that Eddie Manso was dead.

  If you couldn’t send men to their death, you couldn’t command troops. This was basic and everyone knew it. A low-rank combat officer had to be able to take it for granted that some of the men he led into any action would not come back. A strategic officer had it even worse; he would sacrifice patrols and platoons and companies, knowing in advance that he was sentencing men to death in wholesale lots. You had to be able to do this without getting sick about it any more than a chess player let himself mourn for a sacrificed pawn. It was that intimately a part of the game.

  And yet this private war was a very different matter, just as the Special Forces had differed greatly from conventional warfare. When you had only a handful of men, a small elite corps of skilled operatives, you could not squander them as if they were a swarm of foot-slogging infantry. Instead you had to aim for a minimum number of casualties.

  Now, in their private war, they wanted no casualties. Neither the profit nor the pleasure of destroying Platt’s operation was sufficient compensation for the loss of a single man. If Eddie Manso was dead, the entire operation was a failure, no matter how much cash the bank held or how neatly they took it off.

  And Manso was very probably dead.

  And Roger Cross’s legs were killing him.

  “We have to assume that Eddie is alive,” he said at length. “I agree that this is very possibly not the case, but we must act upon the assumption. We will break into the Platt estate tonight. The cover of night i
s of sufficient value to cover the hours we lose by waiting.”

  “And the bank? We still follow through tomorrow on schedule?”

  “No.”

  Simmons said, “Then we abort?”

  “No.”

  “Then what, sir?”

  Colonel Cross folded his hands on the table in front of him. He said, “It is probable that Eddie will undergo intensive interrogation. If that happens, he will talk. This is not criticism of Corporal Manso. Some of you may remember the way some of our Asian friends taught us to interrogate prisoners. I for one will never forget the Montagnard lad who worked with us up around Due Din Hao. A very quiet, soft-spoken boy. Well.

  “Assume Eddie has talked, or will talk. Assume the plan is dead. We cannot do anything for Eddie, if indeed anything can be done, before nightfall.” Colonel Cross drew a breath. “It is now nine twenty-three,” he said. “Louis?”

  “Sir?”

  “Confirm my memory. The Wells Fargo pickup takes place Wednesdays at fourteen hundred hours.”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “There will be four of you instead of five. The old plan is entirely dead and we have only an hour or two to draft a new one. We will make use of the Wells Fargo pickup, and the four of you will hit the bank at fourteen hundred hours this afternoon.” He closed his eyes, his mind already at work, picking at the bones of the Commercial Bank of New Cornwall, probing its defenses, searching for a new way to open it up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The truck left Tarrytown at 10:47. Simmons was driving. He wore the same overalls he had worn during his brief career as a tree surgeon. Under them he wore a dark gray three-button suit and a striped tie. Murdock and Giordano sat alongside him. Giordano wore a conservative suit, a striped shirt, a black knit tie. He had last seen Pat Novak on Monday and since then he had not shaved his moustache. The two days had not had particularly impressive results, but the colonel’s sister had contributed an eyebrow pencil and Giordano’s moustache looked passable.

  Murdock had the other two tags—the crew cut, the wart on the back of his left hand. The wart was putty and could be flicked off on the way out the door. The crew cut would not be so easily dispensed with. Murdock had always worn his hair long, with a sort of pompadour effect in the front, and now suddenly his hair was half an inch long all over his head. It would be a long time returning to normal. But he wasn’t going to be returning to Minneapolis, wouldn’t be dropping back into the slot he’d come out of, so it didn’t much matter.

  Simmons drove south into Manhattan on the Saw Mill River Parkway and the Henry Hudson. He crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey and headed directly into New Cornwall. He stayed just within the speed limit all the way.

  The truck was the same truck he and Murdock had used to case Platt’s estate, but Platt would never have recognized it now. They had sprayed it brown and had hung a pair of cast-off Pennsylvania plates on it. The plates had the same color combination as the current New York plates, which meant that no cop would spot them as phony unless he was standing on top of them. It also guaranteed that the license number would lead the police absolutely nowhere.

  The colonel had obtained the truck for another operation. It was never used and had stayed in the Tarrytown garage ever since on the supposition that a thoroughly untraceable vehicle would come in handy sooner or later. Murdock, who had worked now and then in auto body paint shops, had supervised its most recent change of identity. He had also done the lettering on the doors, identifying the truck as the property of Hedrick’s Appliance Service Corp. of Staten Island, New York.

  Then, in a burst of inspiration, he had covered the white acrylic lettering with a coat of tempera-based watercolor the same shade of brown as the body of the truck. When it was dry, he used a white watercolor to claim the truck in the name of Moeloth & Hofert/Plumbing Contractors/Bayonne, N.J. Two flicks with a damp rag and the truck changed ownership just like that.

  In New Cornwall, Simmons drove straight to the bank, glanced at his watch as they passed it. He said, “Just over forty-five minutes door to door.”

  “About what we figured.”

  “Right.”

  Giordano said, “Plaza two blocks up and three to the left.”

  “Too close, Lou. Something further off?”

  “Yeah. Keep going straight I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  Simmons drove to a large shopping plaza just across the town line on the north. There were two supermarkets, a chain discount house, a bowling alley, a short order restaurant a batch of small retail shops.

  “Beauty parlors are good, Howard. I don’t see one.”

  Murdock said, “Bowling.”

  “Oh, right. A couple hours at the inside, and during the day they’ll be women. By the time they come out they won’t remember where they parked anyway, and they’ll never figure out how to call the law.”

  Simmons didn’t say anything. He drove slowly through the plaza, up one lane and down another. Within five minutes a Dodge wagon pulled into a space and four women got out of it carrying bowling bags.

  Simmons said, “That’s a Dodge, Ben. You want to take it?”

  “Sure.”

  The truck slowed beside the station wagon. Murdock opened his door, swung to the ground. Simmons circled the bank of cars and stood with the motor idling. The four women had entered the bowling alley. The lot was generally clear.

  “Don’t know what he’s waiting for,” Giordano said.

  “Taking his time. Ben likes to get loose first. Then when he does get in, it’s just a matter of driving it away.”

  “Yeah. I always figure the only time you’re really exposed is when you pick up the car. Once you’re away, you’re clean for four, five hours.”

  “Which is why we lay doggo here and screen him.”

  “Uh-huh.” Giordano poked between his teeth with the flap of a matchbook. “Howard?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like it a damn sight better if I were driving.”

  “Soon as Ben gets his car——”

  “Not what I mean. I don’t want to go inside. Her lunch hour’s over at one thirty, and we don’t hit the goddamned bank until two. I don’t see how she’ll miss making me.”

  “You got the moustache, which we’re supposed to show inside the bank. Also I’m the wrong color as far as the earlier job was concerned.”

  “That’s minor compared to her spotting me.”

  “Why? She doesn’t know your name, does she?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then what’s the problem? Ben’s starting her up. Anything on the right? No, ma’am, nothing at all, and off he goes just like that. Very nice.”

  “There were some more bowlers two lanes to the right. Drove up while you were talking. Maroon Ford.”

  “I didn’t even notice. Let’s have a look.”

  Simmons drove around to the second lane on the right. He slowed down beside the car. Giordano had a hand on the door handle, then straightened up. “Keep going,” he said. “The one just came out of the door. She forgot something.”

  Simmons moved on down the line, eased the brown truck into a parking space. A woman in a magenta blouse and a pleated black skirt returned to the Ford, picked up a black calf purse, and headed toward the alleys again.

  “Son of a bitch,” Giordano said. “And here we almost struck it rich. Bet there was eighteen, maybe as much as twenty dollars in that purse.”

  “And the car keys, man.”

  “That’s a point. You get spoiled using car keys. And every once in a while a key’ll break in the ignition, and then where are you? Whereas who in hell ever heard of a jumper wire breaking in the ignition?”

  “Very true. Lou?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You bugged about the teller?”

  “A little.”

  “You call at a quarter to two. Call the bank. You’re a doctor at some hospital and her mother had a heart attack and she’s dying, so your girl should get h
er ass over to the hospital.”

  “Howard, you’re a beautiful man.”

  “Gets her out of the way. I do believe we can swing the dime for the call.”

  “I repeat, you’re a beautiful man. Excuse me, I have to steal a car.”

  The Dodge station wagon wasn’t precisely the sort of car Murdock would have picked for himself. The engine and transmission seemed sound enough and the car steered easily, but somehow the car felt like a toy. He decided it might be the color, a pale blue, or the dirty Kleenex and miscellaneous kids’ crap that littered the rear deck.

  Not that it too much mattered whether he liked it or not, he thought. The odds were that he’d never drive it. There was a good chance, as far as that went, that none of them would be driving the Dodge. It was a principle of the colonel’s that you never went into a place before you set yourself up to get back out again. You gave yourself more room than you needed and as much as you possibly could. If you were going to have to switch cars—if there was even the slimmest damn possibility that you might want to switch cars, even then you borrowed a couple of cars in advance and stashed them in likely places. If you needed them, they were there for you. If it turned out that you never needed them, then sooner or later the local police would turn them up and send them back to their owners. It might make pedestrians out of the owners for a couple of days, but that was just part of the game.

  Murdock drove to the corner of Alder and Summerwood. It was in the middle of a tract of new houses about three miles east of the Commercial Bank of New Cornwall. He parked at the curb in front of a vacant house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn. He left the jumper wire attached to one of the ignition terminals. He slipped on a pair of sheer canvas driving gloves and went over the surfaces of the car that he might have touched. Whether they used that car or not, there was no point in leaving his fingerprints around. The government had accumulated enough of Ben Murdock’s fingerprints over the years. They surely didn’t require any more of them.