The Specialists

  Then he crawled under the car.

  He was still there now, forcing himself to remain alert and prepared without getting jumpy in the process. He played the exercise through his mind and couldn’t find anything wildly wrong with the plan. The only drawback was his relative immobility. It was not particularly easy to get out from under a car in a hurry. Still, he didn’t think that would matter too much.

  He tensed himself at the sound of approaching footsteps. It was the attendant, he knew the kid’s walk by now. And this time the footsteps did not turn away. The kid opened the door on the driver’s side of the big Lincoln, and Manso watched the frame of the car settle as the kid got behind the wheel. The kid turned the key and the starter ground. Where Manso lay, the noise of the starter was particularly loud. He thought, for the first time, what an utter snafu it would be if he’d yanked an unimportant wire and the fucking car started after all. The car would probably run right over him, and he would damn well deserve it.

  But the engine did not catch. The starter motor whirred and whirred and the car shook with the repeated vibration, but there was no spark, no ignition. Give up, Manso thought. Get out of the car before you kill the battery. Go on, you schmuck.

  The door opened, the kid got out and trotted off. Manso gave him a few seconds lead time, then began inching his way out from under the car on the passenger side. He crouched at the side of the car, his feet hidden behind a tire. He saw the kid returning with Buddy Rice walking impatiently on ahead of him. The kid was trying to explain and Rice was saying that he was a stupid little prick and he must have flooded it and why the hell couldn’t he learn how to start a car without flooding the goddamned carburetor, and it better start now or he’ll just be wishing that all Mr. Platt does is get him fired, for Christ’s sake.

  Rice dropped behind the wheel and ground the starter.

  “See, Mr. Rice? It just goes like that, pocketa-pocketa, but it don’t catch. I thought——”

  “Not flooded,” Rice said. He hit the hood latch and was around the front of the car almost at once. “Get your ass over here,” he told the kid. “Did you have this hood up? Don’t give me any shit, now, I’ll find out if you did. It’s a big car, a great car, kids like to fool around with cars. You have this hood up?”

  “Mr. Rice, I swear by my mother——”

  “You got a match? Here, I got one, take this. Light it and hold it steady, for Christ’s sake. I said steady, I can’t see a thing.”

  Manso had the knife in his left hand. It was a throwing knife, a hiltless wedge of fine German steel. Knives with hilts were supposed to be better for combat use, but Manso liked this one because it was so easy to conceal. You could tape it to your arm or put it in your shoe, anything, and there was no bulge and nobody knew it was there. He had the knife in his right hand and his left hand was up a few inches in front of his face, the elbow bent sharply in front of him. He moved quickly, silently, away from the car and around in an arc that took him behind the two of them.

  “Why, you little shit, look at that! You see that wire? You were playing around and you knocked it loose.”

  “I swear, I swear by my mother——”

  “Fuck your mother,” Rice said.

  That was all he said. Manso chopped once at the back of the kid’s neck, pulling the blow back at the moment of impact and slapping the hand at once over Rice’s mouth. The other hand, the one with the knife, was already in motion. Manso remembered a sentry in Laos, remembered other men who had died noiselessly, and even as the memory flashed in his mind the little wedge of steel slipped neatly between Buddy Rice’s neck and collarbone, slipped neatly in, through the artery, through nerve bundles, neat, easy, like dropping a penny in a slot.

  In and out and then the blade wiped back and forth on Rice’s jacket while he lowered Rice gently to the ground. No time wasted checking the kid. He knew he was alive, and he also knew he’d be out cold for ten minutes at the least. He spun, ran, the knife again taped to his arm, the undershirt bunched in his hands. In seconds he was over the fence and running through the yard and down the driveway. He trotted to the Plymouth, started it up, and drove off slowly, resisting the urge to put the gas pedal on the floor.

  Buddy Rice had been dead for six minutes when Platt found him. By that time Manso was ten blocks away.

  THIRTEEN

  Dehn came back upstairs carrying a small wooden salad bowl. It contained two scoops of ice cream swimming in chocolate sauce and topped with gobs of marshmallow and chocolate mint sprinkles. The colonel looked at it and wrinkled his nose.

  “Good heavens,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’re actually going to eat that?”

  “It’s a chocolate sundae.”

  “Yes, I realize that. Is that whipped cream? I’m surprised Helen had the necessary ingredients on hand.”

  “It’s marshmallow, sir. And I don’t think she did. I stopped on the way and put the stuff in the fridge earlier.” He took a spoonful and smiled apologetically. “A sweet tooth,” he said.

  “It’s a wonder you don’t put on weight.”

  “I don’t eat that heavily, sir. And of course I stay active. But late at night I get a yen for something sweet, about the way most people want a nightcap.”

  The colonel shook his head slowly. “Now, I’m sure I haven’t eaten anything like that in thirty years.”

  “Want one? I’ll fix you one.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Frank.”

  “I’m an expert, sir. It won’t take me a minute, and you can go over the drawings some more while I’m downstairs.”

  “I couldn’t eat that much. Maybe a fourth the size of yours——”

  “A small one, then. Be right up.”

  The colonel shook his head again, slowly, then chuckled gently to himself. He was studying Dehn’s drawings when the phone rang. Dehn had taken enough correspondence courses to function fairly well as an amateur draftsman, working smoothly with T-square and compass, and the sheet of graph paper tacked to the large oak board would probably be a satisfactory approximation of the architect’s blueprints of the Commercial Bank of New Cornwall.

  It was Manso on the phone. The colonel listened for a few moments, replied in monosyllables, then put the receiver on the hook. He looked again at the drawings but could not focus his mind on them. He thought instead of life and death, of crime and punishment, of the endless parade of eternal riddles.

  His Bible was on his desk. It was a large leather-bound volume, the cover rubbed and water-spotted, many of the pages stained. It had been in the Cross family for over a century. He held it in his hands now and remembered holding it as a boy and marveling at the date on the title page, BOSTON: MDCCCLVII. 1857. When he first looked at it, the book had seemed ancient. Now he himself was very nearly as old as it had been then.

  Exodus, the twenty-first chapter. “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death. And if a man lie not in wait, but God deliver him into his hand; then I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee. But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die. . . . And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

  He placed his hands palms-down on the desk and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. He heard Dehn on the stairs, heard him at the doorway, but he did not move, and after a moment’s hesitation Dehn went back into the hallway.

  Cross flipped from the Old Testament to the New, from the Father to the Son. Matthew, V, 38-9. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

  The Old and the New, the Father and the Son. Was it a paradox?

  The Son died young, he thought. The young are different, they see with different eyes, they see wh
at ought to be. And he thought, while wondering if the thought was blasphemous, that had the Son lived longer, His eyes and soul would have aged with Him, He would have grown more like His Father. He would have resisted evil, He would have returned eye for eye.

  Cross pushed himself back from the desk, coughed a signal to Dehn. The ice cream, he discovered, was a treat. Not something he would care for once a day, certainly. In fact, an interval of thirty years between such dishes struck him as about right. But it was undeniably a treat.

  “Manso called,” he said. “The bodyguard is dead.”

  “Rice?”

  “Burton Riess or Buddy Rice, as you prefer. Arsonist, murderer, bodyguard, and chauffeur. Edward said there were no complications.”

  “That’s good news, sir.”

  “Yes,” Cross said. “It is. Let’s get back to your drawings now, Frank.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jordie, oh, Jesus, I never thought——”

  “Me, too, Pat. It happened.”

  “I’d hate for you to think——”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Because you know, a divorcee, some people think——”

  “Don’t even say it.”

  “They figure just because a woman was married once——”

  “Pat,” he said. He put a hand on her shoulder, ran it slowly down the side of her body. She had too much flesh on her and Giordano didn’t like that, but her skin was wonderful, soft and smooth and perfect in texture. “Pat, it happened. It was clean and natural and good and I’m glad it happened. We’re a couple of lonely people, Pat. We needed each other and we found each other and it was good.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was good for you, wasn’t it, baby?”

  “It was so good I’m ashamed, that’s how good it was.”

  “Don’t be ashamed. You’re a healthy woman, Pat. Patricia.”

  “I never liked that name.”

  “You mean Patricia?”

  “I never cared for it. It sounded, you know, prissy.”

  “Listen, how’d you like to grow up with a handle like Jordan?”

  “Oh, it’s got character, it’s very strong and dignified both at once. Jordan. It’s a fine name.”

  “Character and dignified isn’t such a bargain when you’re a skinny kid.”

  “Don’t say skinny.” She touched him. “I wish I was built like you.”

  “That’s a hell of a thought. You wouldn’t have these.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean. Oh. Oh, Jesus, don’t. Oh, I don’t think——”

  He kissed her, and she resisted for just an instant and then responded wildly, her arms tight around him, her tongue urgent in his mouth. He moved over her and her full thighs parted for him and he entered her at once, slipped softly home, and she lay back, eyes closed and teeth clenched, and moaned once and then sighed in the sweet luxury of orgasm.

  He moved within her, slowly, stroking, stroking, and twice more he made her gasp and cry out until at last he felt that precious tickle in his loins. And then, as it came upon him, he was clinging to her breasts and hammering his loins into hers and crying out, shouting “Yes, yes, now, now, yes!”

  As he drove her home she told him that he made her feel like a goddess. “Never like this, never before. Oh, Jordan.”

  She looked prettier now. Good medicine, he thought. Not so much the sex, that wasn’t what did it or else every jerkoff kid would be Mr. America. It was the romance that did it. Caring, feeling, relating, it all made her look more like a woman and less like Elsie Borden.

  “You turn right at the next corner. I wish I didn’t have to go home. That house. I wish we could have slept together all night long. Oh, listen to me, just listen, I sound like a whore.”

  “Not you. Not my Patricia.”

  “The way you say it I like my name. You make it sound like I’m a queen.”

  “Did I, uh, make you happy?”

  “God, yes. I didn’t, I haven’t, I’m not, oh——”

  “Don’t talk.”

  “It’s the next right and then a left.”

  “I know.”

  She settled her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. This was the difficult part for him largely, because it was a departure from the normal course of events. Ordinarily now he would be trying to cool it with her, to set her up gently so that she would not be inordinately surprised when he didn’t call her again. And, ordinarily, he certainly wouldn’t call her again. She wasn’t bad in bed but then she wasn’t very good either, long on passion and short on technique. He knew, too, that she would improve even while he was losing interest. Her marriage had probably been less than spectacular in the hay—he would be hearing all about it before long, he supposed—and since then she had probably had a half dozen unsatisfying tumbles with no love lost on either side.

  Men were stupid, he thought. They read books and learned tricks, they studied charts of erogenous zones like navigators plotting courses. They thought the whole point was to turn the girl on, to get her hot and then tuck her into the rack. That was the hard way and it didn’t pay. The thing to do, the right thing, was to get the girl to fall in love with you. Not by kissing or petting or blowing in ears, but with words and tone of voice and facial expression.

  Once they were in love, you were home. Once they were in love, they turned themselves on, they got themselves hot.

  They neared her house. He slowed the car and she stirred and opened her eyes. He kissed her gently on her mouth.

  He said, “Tomorrow . . . .”

  DURING

  Platt was wearing a maroon silk dressing gown imported from Italy. It was monogrammed over the heart—A J P. Platt had no middle name, but what kind of a monogram was A P? It looked like a newspaper wire service, a supermarket chain.

  He tightened the belt of the dressing gown and slipped his small feet into soft deerskin slippers. He got up from the edge of the bed and turned to look down at Marlene. Her eyes were closed, her breathing regular as in sleep, but he knew damned well she wasn’t asleep. She always pulled that after he screwed her. Before it didn’t matter, she was his wife and when he wanted her he would slap her awake if he had to. But afterward, after she had gone to the bathroom to scrub his seed away, she seemed to slip into a coma on the way back to the bed. As if she would do anything to avoid being with him at such times.

  Usually it didn’t matter to him. Usually he was asleep himself before she returned to the bedroom. But now and then there were nights when he couldn’t sleep, nights like this one, and at those times her feigned sleep infuriated him.

  He looked at her. He pulled the sheet down, looked at the outlines of her back and buttocks under the nightgown. She still didn’t move. He dropped the sheet in place.

  Even in sleep, or what passed for sleep, the class showed. The rich dark hair, the white neck, the clean sharp features. It was the class that made him want to marry her right after the Lobster died, when he was sitting very pretty and in the mood for the class house and the class wife to go with it. It was the class that kept him from kicking her out on her little round ass, and, perversely, it was the class that made him hate her. She had no right to it, damn it. She was nobody, she was Marlene Pivnick from Ocean Parkway, and what the hell kind of class was Ocean Parkway?

  He looked at her again. He said, “Sleep well, you cunt,” and left the bedroom.

  In robe and slippers he walked out of the house and around to the back. He hadn’t taken twenty steps before a high-powered flashlight picked him up. “Take it easy,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Platt.”

  “No bother, kid. You’re a good kid, you keep your eyes open.”

  He walked on, not even bothering to wonder which of the four nightshift guards it was. He liked that, guards on duty all the time. Longostini had the same setup and hated it, said it made him feel like he was living under a sword. Everybody lived under a sword, for Christ’s sake. Everybody, bar none. And if you
were somebody, if you had it made, you took precautions. It made him feel good, like he was the president, like he had his own little secret service.

  He walked on to where a patch of sod had been cut and replaced just a few hours earlier. No headstone, no casket, nothing, just Buddy Rice in the ground with the lid shoveled on, Buddy Rice waiting for the worms to eat him. What did a dead man need with headstones and caskets?

  When somebody got one of yours, you didn’t call cops, you didn’t phone the newspapers. You put him away privately before the body was cold.

  He shook his head, remembering. The stupid kid couldn’t have done it, there was no way. The punk swore Buddy knocked him out, which didn’t make sense, but anyway there was no knife around and somebody sure as hell did it with a knife and knives don’t walk away.

  But what a goddamned mess. First putting the two broads in a car and sending them the hell home, which was why he had had to throw it to bitch Marlene when he’d been planning on taking those blondes both at once, since Kohler wasn’t up to that scene anymore. Kohler was too busy dying to take an interest, he only wanted the tail around for decorative purposes. And Kohler almost died ahead of schedule, shaken by the sight of Buddy, and he had had to send Kohler home in another car and then call still another car with a couple of strong boys in it to get Buddy the hell home and under the ground before some idiot cop stuck his nose in.

  He took a cigar from his pocket, unwrapped it, tucked the cellophane back in the pocket, flicked his lighter, and got the thing going. You could barely see the seams where they cut the sod. Once you were done, you were gone forever, gone all the way, and you couldn’t ask to be remembered. Buddy was with him how long? Say ten years at the inside, and as soon as the last chunk of sod was stamped down, one of the boys was at Platt’s side with hopes in his eyes.