Lawrence Block - The Specialists

Giordano didn’t see how he could possibly buy it. Oh, the colonel’s sister had done a good job, no question about it. While the five of them were still on their way to Tarrytown she was checking death records at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, looking for a woman who had died within the year, a woman born in Brooklyn somewhere between 1920 and 1925. A woman who’d moved out of Brooklyn just before the start of World War II. A woman who left no husband or children. A woman, in short, who had been in the right place at the right time and who had left that place at the right time and who had over the years left precious few traces of herself.

That was the background, and the colonel’s sister had made a good piece of work of it but it remained nothing more than background, a stage set for Eddie to play against. The long-lost bastard son routine — when the colonel had first outlined it, sitting up straight in that wheelchair and pointing things out on a blackboard like a brass hat in a map room, Giordano had been inches from laughter. But when Old Rugged Cross asked for comments, Giordano kept his mouth shut. There were, after all, two things you didn’t do. You didn’t tell a woman her breath stank and you didn’t tell an officer he had rocks in his head.

Which was not to say that there was anything wrong with the colonel’s head. And the more Giordano had thought about it, the more he saw the good aspects of the plan. If it worked, it gave them a tremendous edge. It not only put a man in the enemy camp. It did that, and it put stars on the man’s shoulders. All in all, Giordano liked it enough to be disappointed when Manso was picked to play the bastard son. It was the proper choice. Manso was right in looks, he talked New York, he knew racket people. Giordano probably had an edge in hand-to-hand, but the bit called for someone who could look the part, and if Giordano went in applying for a job as bodyguard all he would provoke was laughter.

He wondered, suddenly, if he had ever fathered a child.

It was a crazy thought, he told himself. Platt, yeah, maybe he could believe something like that. That was a generation ago, when rubbers were unreliable and only married women had diaphragms and not even science fiction writers had discovered the Pill. For Giordano the whole situation was entirely different. The girls he knew swallowed the Swinger’s Friend with their orange juice every morning. There was a drugstore on every corner and nobody had to have a baby.

Patricia Novak, he thought

Divorced, lonely, living with her parents. Was she on the Pill? He had never even thought to wonder because he had for so long taken it for granted that every woman was on the Pill. Not her, though. He was instantly certain of it. Not her.

Jesus—

You fucking fool, he thought savagely, Eddie’s up against the wall and you got nothing better to do than worry if some pig has a cake in her oven. If she does you’ll never even know about it. You’ll be gone in a week, and New Cornwall isn’t the sort of place anyone ever visited without having to, and you’ll never see her again, and it’ll be two months before she even knows she’s pregnant. And what you don’t know about isn’t really there, unless you’re fool enough to imagine it you idiot.

He looked at his watch. It was 5:27. He found himself wondering what he would do if some girl he barely remembered told him she was raising his child. He supposed he would send money — the hell, you never missed money, it was so easy to get more of it. But how would he feel about it? How would he feel about the kid? And it began to dawn on him that the colonel had nothing resembling rocks in that head of his. The legs might be gone, but there was nothing the matter with the head.

At 5:31 the receiver next to him began to beep.

Frank Dehn said, “They came into the bank at different times and moved into position. Wore ordinary business suits and had their guns under their jackets. Must have moved on a time signal, two men on the tellers, one at the door, another on the bank vice-president. They took him downstairs and made him open the vault. Couldn’t have been much of a problem there. Platt would have seen to it that they picked a man who was clued in and knew to open up for them. They cleaned the tellers after they hit the vault. Left the silver, of course. The teller got hers because she tried to be a hero, went for the alarm. The guard may have been window dressing. Hard to say. The idea is he tried for his gun, but he died with the gun still in his holster and according to a couple of witnesses he never even moved for it kept his hands in the air all the time. So either one of the robbers panicked or else they figured to make it more authentic by scratching a guard. They play nasty.”

“Appearance? Voice?”

“All white, so Howard can drive. They used a stolen car, incidentally, left it seven blocks away. What else? A wart on somebody’s hand, and the majority opinion was that the wart was on the left hand of a tall guy with a crew cut. A dark guy with a thin moustache; a couple of witnesses missed the moustache, but the rest reported it. Not much on the voices except the usual garbage — they were menacing, they were bitter, you know the way witnesses project. What else? The moustache was the last one out the door, kept the crowd covered while the rest piled into the car. Car was not on the scene until they started out, then moved in on cue to pick them up...”

Louis Giordano said, “Her lunch hour’s twelve thirty to one thirty, so if we hit it then, she’ll be out. The tellers have each got an alarm button on the floor. They hit it with their feet if they get a chance, but they’ve all got instructions to stay cool if there’s a holdup. They aren’t supposed to take chances. Where’s the drawings? The buttons are here and here and here, and evidently there’s a wire running across here that they’re all hooked to. Hit that wire and they’re all dead.

“Cash on hand remains pretty constant, as far as she knows. A Wells Fargo car comes by every Wednesday at two to deliver change and small bills and pick up old bills and silver coins for shipment to the Federal Reserve. There’s not that much cash involved, though, so you can discount that part.

“On the vault, she doesn’t know too much about that part of the operation. The president is somebody named Caspers, but he’s out most of the time. There’s a vice-president named Devlin. I get the impression that he runs the show most of the time. He has the vault combination; she knows that because he’s the one who opens up for the armored car boys...”

Edward Manso said, “The front gate is clean. The rest of the fence all the way around is electrified from ten at night until seven in the morning. During the day he has two men on the front gate and one roaming the grounds in back, but there will also be odd hoods that sort of wander around when they don’t have anything better to do. At night, from ten to seven, the force is beefed up. Still two men on the front gate, but others here and here and here. A total of five at night. At night there are alarms on all the doors and windows. They’re wired to the front gate. We went out for air last night and we didn’t go five steps before a flashlight picked us up. The night men have walkie-talkies connecting to the front gate, so everybody’s in close contact. Marlene says she feels like she’s living in a prison. At first I thought she was just there for the soft life, but now I don’t know. I think there’s a pretty big love-hate thing there. He’s got some kind of emotional hold on her. Maybe she responds to his strength, I don’t know. She was bitching about things and I asked her why she stuck around. I got a funny look from her and then a lot of silence. I maybe shouldn’t have asked.”