Parker looked at her, and again he was pleased to have her to look at. “You look good,” he said.
“That’s the whole point,” she said, and the phone rang.
She stopped in the middle of a pirouette, one arm awkwardly curved. She looked at the phone.
Parker picked it up. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry we were cut off before. It was unavoidable. They very nearly saw me.”
It was the same oily voice. Parker said, “You were down in the lobby?”
“Yes, of course. It was necessary for me to leave and then follow them again till they lit. But I’m back now.”
“Downstairs?”
Claire shook her head, as though to deny it was happening.
“Shall I come up?”
“I’ll come down,” Parker said. “I’ll meet you in the bar.”
“A public place might not be the best.”
“You’re not coming up here,” Parker said.
The voice sighed. “Very well. You will find me wearing a red tie. I do not know what you look like, so it will be necessary for you to come to me.”
“All right. I’ll be down in five minutes.”
“Very good.”
Parker hung up and got to his feet. Claire said, “The man who called before?”
“Yes. I’m going down and talk to him.” He took the pistol out from under his pillow and tucked it into his left hip pocket.
Her eyes widened when she saw the gun. “You didn’t have that before.”
“I’ll be back in a little while,” he said. “Put the night lock on. Don’t open the door to anybody but me.”
“You knew it wasn’t done with,” she said, staring at him. “You knew they’d be back.”
“It was a chance. I won’t be long.” He put on his jacket and left.
4
The hotel bar was a dark, square room with the bar along the back wall and the rest of the space taken up with low tables flanked by low, broad Naugahyde chairs, everything in shades of brown with brass fixtures.
Parker sat at the first table to the right, just inside the door. There was a bowl of peanuts there. He took a handful of peanuts, ate a couple, and looked at the reflection in the back bar mirror of the man with the red necktie sitting at the end of the bar.
Perhaps thirty. Suit a little bit seedy but proper, a nondescript brown. Face handsome but weak, with a yellow-tan moustache, as though his dreams of glory included being a British air ace of the First World War. His hair was yellow-tan, too, and thinning, the long hairs brushed straight back from a slightly flushed forehead. He was drinking something with a cherry and a slice of orange in it, and he betrayed nervousness only by constantly looking at himself in the mirror and constantly turning and turning his glass on the bar.
There were about a dozen other customers in the bar. Parker watched them all, and when he was sure none of them cared about the man with the red necktie he shook his head at the waiter finally coming this way, got to his feet, and walked over to sit at the bar.
The other looked at him in the back bar mirror. His lips curved into a little V of a smile under his moustache, like a pornographer about to show his pictures, and he murmured, “Mr Walker. A pleasure.”
“I didn’t get your name.” Parker didn’t bother with the mirror routine. He turned his head and watched the other’s profile, less than arm’s reach away. All around, people murmured their conversations together.
“Hoskins.” He kept looking at the mirror, and bowed to it. “How do you do?”
“What do you want, Hoskins?”
“So very direct.” Still with that little smile, Hoskins shook his head at the mirror and sipped at his drink. Putting the glass down he said, “We shouldn’t rush into this, Mr Walker, not till we know each other a little better.”
Parker controlled his impatience. If Claire hadn’t been around on this trip, he would have agreed to meet Hoskins in the room, and by now Hoskins would be talking very fast, in complete and informative sentences. But the way things were there was no place private to take Hoskins, and in public here there was no way to hurry him.
He turned away from Hoskins to the bartender passing by. “Scotch and water.”
“Sir.”
He looked back at Hoskins. “It’s your ball,” he said.
Hoskins ducked his head slightly, still smiling, as though he’d been complimented and was showing a pretty embarrassment. Then he turned his head to look at Parker directly, his little smile disappeared, and he said, “What did you tell them?”
“That I didn’t know what was going on.”
Hoskins made an impatient gesture. “Not them,” he said. “Gonor and that bunch of his, what did you tell them?”
Parker said, “Why?”
The little smile came back. “I have to know if you’re working for them, don’t I? I have to know if your sense of loyalty is involved, don’t I?”
“It isn’t,” Parker said.
“You told them no?”
“I haven’t told them anything.”
Hoskins was pleased. “Good,” he said. “Let him wait a little while, let him get anxious. That was my mistake, you know; I looked too eager, I jumped too soon. I admit it, I was too anxious.”
“So now you’re out?”
Hoskins looked surprised. “They wouldn’t be coming to you if I was still their man, would they?”
“No, they wouldn’t,” said Parker. He was still waiting for Hoskins to say the one thing that would turn all the rest of this gibberish into sense. Given enough time, and by the obvious slackness of his nature, Hoskins finally would come up with it. All it took was patience, which for Parker did not come naturally.
“There’s plenty in it for two men,” Hoskins was saying. “They tell you how much?”
“No.”
Hoskins nodded grimly. “Full of little hints, aren’t they? But they won’t come right out with it. Well, I tell you I’m convinced it can’t be less than a million! It can’t be! It only stands to reason. The Colonel wouldn’t walk out with less than that, would he?”
“Maybe not,” Parker said. He was wondering if the Colonel was the same as Gonor, the other name Hoskins had mentioned. Or was the Colonel one of the three who’d been in the room before?
Hoskins said, “So there’s plenty for two men, you can see that. Two smart men working together. Whitemen. You see what I mean.”
“It’s possible,” Parker said, and the bartender appeared and put his drink in front of him, saying:
“Are you Mr Walker?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wanted on the phone, sir. I’ll bring it to you.”
The bartender went away, and Hoskins, looking very suspicious and nervous, said, “Is that them?”
“My wife is the only one who knows I’m here,” Parker said. He and Claire were traveling as Mr and Mrs Walker, and since this one obviously didn’t know about the Parker name, he probably accepted Claire’s wife status, too. In any case, it was simplest to describe her that way.
Hoskins worked moodily at his drink while they waited for the phone to be brought. He didn’t look at Parker at all now, neither directly nor in the mirror, but gloomily studied the surface of the bar as though thinking about flaws in his course of action.
The bartender brought the phone and handed the receiver to Parker.
Parker said, “Yes?”
It was Claire. “There are four men here,” she said. It was hard to tell anything from her voice.
Parker said, “The same?”
“No,” she said. “These are different ones. I told them about the others, and what you’re doing now, and they promised to explain everything.”
“Why did you?”
“Tell them? They aren’t like the others; you’ll see. There’s nothing to worry about.”
There was always something to worry about when various groups were maneuvering around each other and at least one of them was flashing guns, but Parker didn�
�t say anything about that. He said, “I’ll be right up,” and hung up.
Hoskins was watching him worriedly. “Trouble?”
“My wife wants to see me. I have to go up for just a minute. You want to come along or wait here?”
“I believe I’ll wait,” Hoskins said.
“Watch my drink,” Parker told him. “I’ll be right back.”
5
Four black men in red robes stood and sat around the room, like a scene in a Negro version of Julius Caesar. Claire, legs crossed, cigarette in hand, at ease, sat in the chair near the window. She was still wearing the new outfit she’d put on to show him just before he left.
Parker shut the door with his left hand and let the hand dangle near his hip. He looked around at the faces.
Claire made the introductions, gesturing at the one of the four who was coming toward Parker now with a solemn face and an outstretched hand. “Mr Gonor,” she said, “this is Mr Parker. Parker, this is Gonor.”
The use of the name surprised him. He looked away from Gonor at Claire.
She smiled slightly and shook her head. “That was the name they knew,” she said. “Like the other ones.”
“We are most sorry about that experience,” Gonor said. His hand was still out. He was short, no more than five feet tall, and he looked up solemnly at Parker as he spoke. “They got to you before we did,” he said. He had some sort of faint accent too, a little harsher than the first group. It might have been two versions of the same accent, such as German might be if spoken by an American from the North and an American from the South.
Parker said, “Is that what it was? They thought I’d already talked to you so I’d already know what was going on?”
“Yes.” Gonor’s hand was still out there, undaunted.
“And the same with Hoskins,” Parker said.
Gonor’s hand dropped to his side, and his expression became suddenly wary. “Hoskins? You know him?”
“I just met him. He called me and we met and talked. He thought I knew about things too. He’s downstairs now, waiting for me. In the bar.”
Gonor turned his head and said something short and harsh in a language Parker had never heard before. Two of the others nodded and headed for the door.
Parker put his back against the door. “I haven’t taken sides yet,” he said. “The advertisement was you were going to tell me what’s going on.”
“What did Hoskins tell you?”
“Nothing. Doubletalk, like the other bunch.”
“He shouldn’t be here,” Gonor said. “He shouldn’t be involved any more; he was told to stay away.”
“He’ll keep,” Parker said. “Tell me the story first.”
Gonor cocked his head to one side. “Have you made a deal with him? Is that why you don’t want us to go get him?”
“Get him and do what with him?”
“Bring him up here. Make sure he stays away from now on.”
Parker moved away from the door. “Bring him up,” he said. “That’s a good idea. If you see the other bunch, bring them up too. Let’s find out what’s going on.”
“You’ll find out, Mr Parker.”
The other two were heading for the door again. Parker said to them, “Hoskins only knows me as Walker.”
“It isn’t our intention to endanger the structure of your life, Mr Parker,” Gonor said. “We’ll use the Walker name, if you prefer.”
“I prefer.”
The two went out, and Gonor said, “First, I suppose I should present my credentials. I have been sent to you by a Mr McKay, who operates a restaurant in a small city in Maine.”
“A diner,” Parker said.
Gonor nodded. “Yes. A small restaurant, with chrome.”
“All right,” Parker said. Handy McKay was the one man who knew Parker’s whereabouts and what name he was living under. Anybody who wanted to get in touch with Parker had to do so through Handy.
Gonor said, “We were sent to Mr McKay, in turn, by a man named Karns. Do you also know him?”
“Yes,” Parker said. A few years ago he’d had some trouble with a gambling-and-narcotics syndicate, and he’d had to get rid of the man at the top of it. Karns had taken that man’s place and had been grateful to Parker for making it possible.
“We went to Mr Karns,” Gonor said, “when Hoskins failed to be what we had in mind. We were looking for a criminal, but of a very particular kind. Hoskins is certainly a criminal, but not with the qualifications we need.”
“Karns didn’t send you to Hoskins?”
“No. We found Hoskins on our own.” Gonor shook his head, as though reflecting on great difficulties in the past. “The United States is a large and complex nation,” he said. “A nation of specialists. Here more than anywhere else in the world there will be someone capable of handling any specific task, no matter how unusual. The only problem is to find him.”
Claire said, “Mr Gonor, wouldn’t you like to sit down?”
He half turned and gave her a gracious nod. “No, thank you,” he said. “I lead too sedentary a life; I prefer to stand when possible.”
Claire looked at Parker. “He’s at the UN,” she explained, and he understood her to mean that she was sold on Gonor and wanted him to be too.
Gonor pursed his lips, as though he considered the revelation premature. “As I was saying,” he said, looking back at Parker, “finding the specialist is not always easy. One knows the specialist is here, somewhere, and all one can do is sift. We my associates and I we required a criminal. None of us has any experience of the criminal life, at least not in this country, so we began at a disadvantage. In our search, the first prospect we turned up was Hoskins. He is a confidence man, which is the wrong specialty, but he managed to make us believe for a time that he could help us. I believe he intended merely to rob us if by chance we should prove successful.”
Parker nodded. “I think that’s what he was telling me,” he said.
“Of course. We ultimately saw through him, naturally, and rejected him, but he seems intent on hanging around in hopes some profit will fall to him after all.”
“Like a dog under the table,” said the other one, who was sitting on the foot of Claire’s bed, the packages all in a jumble behind him.
“Yes,” Gonor said, turning toward him. “Mr Parker, this is Bara Formutesca, an assistant at the mission.”
Formutesca nodded at Parker with an ironic smile. He was a younger man than Gonor, possibly in his early twenties, and beneath the red robe he seemed to have a compactly muscular body. “A pleasure,” he said.
Parker nodded back at him, then looked at Gonor again. “So you went from Hoskins to Karns,” he said.
“Our searching in the underworld brought us to Mr Karns’s attention,” Gonor said. “He sent emissaries to question us, then met with me himself, and finally suggested you. He said we could trust you but that we might have difficulty persuading you to work for us. Particularly if you had worked recently and didn’t need the money.”
“I don’t need the money,” Parker said.
Gonor pursed his lips. “Unfortunate,” he said. “Still, we can only try to persuade you.”
Parker turned to Claire. “Do you want to hear this?”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Mr Gonor’s different.”
He knew she meant that Gonor didn’t smell to her of violence. Violence was what frightened her, violence and the possibility of violence, which was why she didn’t want to be around when Parker was planning or working on a caper, didn’t want to hear about the details, didn’t want to know where Parker was going when he left on a job. Gonor wasn’t the kind of man Parker usually worked with so she didn’t think of him in connection with violence, but Parker knew she was wrong. Gonor might not be the right type for it, but now he was involved in something with the sharp metallic taste of violence all over it and he wanted Parker to get involved in it too.
But it wasn’t up to him to talk her into leaving. He shrugged
and said to Gonor, “All right, go ahead.”
“Fine,” said Gonor. But then, instead of talking, he turned away and began to pace, looking down at his feet as they touched the carpet. Pacing, looking down, he said, “Have you ever heard of Dhaba?”
“No.”
Gonor nodded as he paced, as though it was the answer he’d expected. “Dhaba,” he said, “is a nation. On the continent of Africa. Thirty-four months old on the first of April.”
“I never heard of it,” Parker said.
Formutesca, with that sardonic smile on his face again, said, “The world is full of little countries, Mr Parker. Togo, for instance. Upper Volta. Mauritania. Gabon. Mali. You don’t hear of them unless they’re involved in a war or a revolution. Like Yemen, or Nigeria.”
Gonor said, “So far, Dhaba has had a peaceful life and has not appeared on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Unfortunately, that is soon to change.”
Parker glanced at Claire, but she was watching Gonor with interest. So far it didn’t mean anything to her.
Gonor said, “I have the honor to represent my country at the United Nations. Mr Formutesca here, and the other two you met, are part of the mission staff. Our nation is led by Colonel Joseph Lubudi.”
“Uh huh,” said Parker.
Gonor glanced at him. “You have heard of the Colonel?”
Parker said, “Hoskins mentioned a colonel. He didn’t give the name.”
“What did he say about the Colonel?”
“That he wouldn’t leave with less than a million.”
Gonor looked displeased, but Formutesca laughed, saying, “Hoskins has an inflated view of our economy.”
Parker said, “Every once in a while I read in the paper where the head of some little country raids the country’s treasury and takes off to the Riviera. Is that what we’ve got here?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Gonor nodded and started his pacing again. “The Colonel has already made his raid,” he said, “but he has not as yet joined his money overseas.”
“The money’s out of the country?”
Formutesca, his smile grim, said, “It’s in New York.”
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