Lawrence Block - The Specialists

“Not this sheep,” Simmons said.

“Everybody says. Everybody.” Mbora stood up, clasped his hands together behind his back, lowered his head, paced like a caged jungle cat. He had protruding eyes that were even more prominent behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike the girl and the silent man, he wore western clothes — a three-button black worsted suit, a button-down shirt, a black knit tie. He was thin and knobby, and he reminded Simmons of someone, but he couldn’t think who.

“You want to know something? You wonder why I waste my time on you?” A finger quivered under Simmons’ nose. “Because two minutes of talking to you and I know you got a head on you. You got a brain in that head. You walk these streets and so many is so ignorant. From the day they’re born they get told how niggers is dumb, and you tell a child this from the cradle on and they grow up dumb, they grow up with a head they don’t know how to use. So when I meet a soul brother with a mind, I stay with him, I talk to him, I make my words drive that honkie poison out of his pure and beautiful black soul. You understand me, brother?”

“I understand you.”

Mbora marched to the window, waved out at the street. “Down there they don’t think. You start with men that think, that think right, that use their heads to think black, then you get them down there to follow. They’d follow like sheep to slaughter or they’d follow like an avenging wave, just so it’s following with no thinking called for.”

Who the hell was it he reminded Simmons of? He wished he could remember. It was hard to concentrate on the conversation without knowing.

“We shook this city up, brother. We’ll shake this city up again. And other cities. This whole honkie state, and other states...”

The burnings made sense to Simmons. It was the same way in Detroit. There were buildings no one could save and no one would tear down, and the people who had to live in them were better off burning them, because empty lots were better than those rat-traps.

But the killing and the looting — no. No, he couldn’t buy it. All it did was leave black bodies bleeding on the ground. All it did was tell the bigots that they were right and black men were animals. Simmons knew what war was and how war worked, and he couldn’t see the point in being in a war unless you stood a chance to win it. Vietnam or Newark, if you weren’t going to win it, you ought to go home.

“You got a brain, brother.” The finger in his face again. “But a brain by itself is not enough. You need something to go with that fine black brain. You know what you need? The man has said it. You need to go and get yourself some guns.”

Simmons nodded enthusiastically. Son of a bitch, he thought he didn’t even have to drag the subject into the conversation. Mbora got there all by himself. And in the next instant he knew who it was that Mbora reminded him of. He was, yes, no question, he was a black Woody Allen.

The girl’s name was Patricia Novak. She was around twenty-eight, and Giordano gathered that she had been divorced for two or three years. She had two rather uninspiring kids whom Giordano had met when he picked her up at her house. Her parents’ house. She was twenty-eight years old and divorced and she lived with her parents, and that just about said it.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with her. She was just a little taller than Giordano, just a little too heavy in the waist and hips, just a little too broad in the face. A few months of substituting proteins for carbohydrates would cure that. What it wouldn’t cure was the bovine cast to her face. Her features were all right but Giordano knew that the features were the least important part of the face. They were like the jewels in a watch. What made a watch worth several hundred dollars was not the two or three dollars worth of industrial diamonds but the craftsmanship that went into it. In the same way, the beauty in a human face came not from its inborn features but from the personality that came through it. When a girl looked dull and stupid, it was generally because she was a dull and stupid girl.

“That was really one wonderful meal, Pat,” he told her. “I never would have picked that good a restaurant myself.”

“I didn’t know if you’d like Italian food,” she said.

“Oh, you can’t beat it.”

“That’s about the best place around, everybody says.”

Then everybody was crazy, Giordano thought. All pasta dishes should be al dente , not overcooked like a mouthful of mush. And the sauces — his mother would put a bottle of ketchup on the table before she trotted out a sauce like that. Well, everybody had always said Neapolitans couldn’t boil water. The restaurant called itself the Breath of Naples, and that was accurate enough. The breath of Naples, he thought, was seventy percent garlic.

He opened the car door for her, helped her inside, then walked around and got behind the wheel. He wondered how many people held car doors for her. Stop it, he told himself. You don’t just have to get through this evening. You have to string her for maybe a week, because she works in the place and knows the answers to questions you haven’t even thought up yet. And if you’re going to spend as much as a week fucking this side of beef, you have to sell yourself on her. Seducing her may not be a challenge, but you have to seduce yourself, and the first step is to stop taking mental potshots at the kid.

He started the engine but left the transmission in Park. “I’ll tell you, Pat. I was thinking about a movie.”

“Oh, that’s swell, Jordan.”

Jordan Lewis, that was the name he’d given her. Very obvious and amateur, but he had one particular mental block — whenever he used aliases, he forgot them. Jordan Lewis he had used frequently in the past; he would at least be apt to remember it.

“I checked a paper, the movies. There wasn’t too much of a selection.”

“Every town in Jersey, they’ll have three theaters, and all over the whole state they just have three different movies.”

“They call it block-booking,” he said. He decided it wasn’t unreasonable for him to know this. He had told her he was an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations. “But the point is, Pat, none of the movies appealed very much. There was one at a drive-in, but I’ll tell you the truth, I hate watching a movie at a drive-in.”

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I’m the same.”

“You’ve got the screen way out in front of you and the sound booming next to your ear and it doesn’t seem real. And then all the crazy kids you find at those places.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

He turned to her, a shy look on his face. “Any movie, though, I’ll tell you, Pat, a movie isn’t much of a treat for me. I must see three, four movies a week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What else do you do when you’re in a strange town and you don’t know anybody? To me a movie is part of being alone.”

“I know what you mean. That television set, sometimes when I think of the time a person can sit in front of that box and just stare at it like a moron—”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

He pulled away from the curb, drove slowly with both hands on the wheel. “What I like, what I really like, is just to talk to somebody. And that’s the rarest thing in the world.”

“You must meet plenty of people, Jordan.”

“But how many people do you meet that you can talk to? I mean really talk to. I mean relax and open up and talk.”

“Look at all the people come into the bank. I know what you mean, it’s the same.”

She wasn’t a bad kid, he told himself. Not a bad kid at all. The boxes people get into, the binds. She was okay.