The Green Eagle Score

1

“They’re going to do it,” Ellen said. “I know they’re going to do it now.” Shivering, she hugged herself and shook her head. “I thought it was just a dream for a long while, just a game they were playing. I thought my husband had learned his lesson, I thought he was too scared to try anything like that again. But it’s real, it’s going to happen, and this time he’s going to take Stan with him.”

Dr. Godden said, “What makes you so sure?”

“The man who came today,” Ellen said. “The man my husband brought back with him from Puerto Rico.”

It was easy to talk to Dr. Godden. She could fold her arms around herself an look at the intricate patterns in the Persian rug and tell him everything, everything that troubled her. She’d never been able to talk to anybody else like this, never in her life. Certainly not her parents, who listened only to judge, who were never anything in her life but judges, critical judges, prejudiced judges, hanging judges. And certainly not Marty Fusco, whom she now understood she’d married simply as an act of revolt against her parents and who had been no one to understand and help a person like her at all. There was no one, that was the bare fact of it, no one on earth to talk to, no one who would pay attention and try to see and understand and help. Until Dr. Fred Godden.

It was the boy before Stan who’d first talked to her about going into analysis, and of course then she’d laughed at the idea, she’d thought analysis was for complicated neurotic people, movie stars and famous writers and society people and like that. Ordinary people like her didn’t go to psychoanalysts. But Bert — that was his name — did go to an analyst, because of deep-seated hidden fears that he was homosexual, and eventually he talked Ellen into going to Dr. Godden, too. Not long after that, Bert moved to New York City, to Greenwich Village, to try to work out his problem down there, but by then Ellen had learned just how good analysis could be, and she’d kept on with it ever since.

It was Dr. Godden who’d helped her get rid of all that leftover guilt she’d been carrying around, not even knowing it was there, weighing her down, making her do things that afterward she knew didn’t make any sense, things that only could wind up with her getting hurt again.

Because she’d wanted to get hurt, it was as simple as that. All the guilt her parents had saddled on to her, and then the guilt of feeling that she’d let Marty Fusco down, betrayed him, when she’d divorced him after he was sent away to prison.

But it had been the right thing to do. Because he hadn’t been the right man for her, he was only a symbol of a revolt that was now complete. She didn’t have to do symbolic things against her parents anymore, she was free of them now. So it was right to have divorced Marty, and that was the reason it was right and the real reason she’d done it, though at the time she’d told herself it was because of Pamela.

There was guilt there, too, guilt toward Pamela, feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence. It was all very confused still, very muddled and unclear, but they’d been working on it, hour by hour, three hour-long sessions a week, Monday and Wednesday and Friday, and they’d been getting closer and closer to the root of it all, and then this robbery business had come along, throwing everything out of kilter, and since then it seemed that was all she could ever talk about with Dr Godden.

Particularly in the last week, since Marty had found out where his so-called “organizer” was, at his ease between robberies down there in Puerto Rico, and Stan had offered to pay Marty’s plane fare down to talk to this man, this Parker, and bring him back.

And now he was here, and it was real, and it was actually going to happen, and Ellen sat in Dr Godden’s office, hugging herself, staring at the complex patterns in the carpet, and felt the heaviness of inevitable disaster weighing down on her like a black raincloud. Because the man had come from Puerto Rico, and it was going to be done.

“Tell me about this man,” said Dr Godden. His voice, as always, was soft and gentle, but not at all dramatic like a hypnotist’s voice in the movies, the way she’d thought psychoanalysts’ voices sounded. And he didn’t have a beard, or an accent, or anything like that. He was just an ordinary man, perhaps forty-five, very well-dressed, balding, with a fringe of black hair over his ears and on the back of his head. He wore glasses with pale plastic rims, and he never took notes, and his eyes were unfailingly sympathetic behind his glasses, and if sometimes the hour went over a little he never rushed her, never complained, never cut her off.

She said in answer to his question, “His name is Parker. I don’t know what his first name, is, nobody said. I don’t like him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s — I don’t know, I look at him and I think he’s evil. But that isn’t right, exactly, I don’t think he’s evil. I mean, I don’t think he’d ever be cruel or anything like that, for the fun of it. I wouldn’t worry about leaving Pam around him, for instance. But — I know.”

“Yes?”

“He wouldn’t hurt Pam, but he wouldn’t care about her either. If something bad happened to her, he wouldn’t be pleased by it but he wouldn’t try to do anything to help her. Unless he saw some gain for himself in it.”

“You mean he seems cold?”

“He doesn’t care. There’s no emotion there.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Godden said, and even though she wasn’t looking at him she could hear the gentle smile in his voice, “everyone has emotions. We all have them — you, me, everyone. Even this man Parker. Perhaps he has them bottled up more than most people, that’s all.”

“That’s just the same, then,” she said. “If he has them and keeps them inside, it’s just the same as not having them at all.”

“That’s very true. But of course you’re seeing this man while he’s at work, you might say. Perhaps in Puerto Rico he’s a very different kind of man. Perhaps there he relaxes and allows himself to feel his emotions.”

She shook her head. “I can’t imagine him ever feeling emotions. I can’t imagine him crying. Or even laughing.”

“Seems to me,” Dr. Godden said gently, “you’ve turned this man into some sort of myth figure, something bigger than life.”

“I don’t know, maybe I have. I suppose I have. Because now it’s real, he means it’s real, it’s going to happen.”

“He’s the organizer you told me about on Monday.”

It always surprised and pleased her when he remembered the things she told him. He had other patients, he was being paid to listen to her, he didn’t have to remember, but he did. “Yes, he is,” she said. “He came up from Puerto Rico.”

“Has he met with Stan?”

“Stan took him out to the base today. That’s why I’m late.”

“Perhaps this man will decide the job is too difficult. Perhaps he’ll tell Stan it can’t be done.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “They’ll do it,” she said. “I know they will. I can see it in all their eyes.”

“The new man, too?”

“Him especially.”

“What do you see in his eyes?”

“I don’t know, it’s — it’s hard to explain. That he’s going to do it, that nothing will stop him from doing it.”

“Hmmmm. When do they plan it for?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, it would be a payday, wouldn’t it? Or the day before. When does the Air Force pay again?”

“The fifteenth. Next Tuesday.”

“Four days from now,” he said. “Can they get ready that quickly?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I remember, with Marty, it always took a week or two, sometimes more. They don’t even have all the men yet. Marty said it would take more than just the three of them.”

“So it would probably be the payday after next,” Dr. Godden said. “The first of October. Let me see, that’s a Thursday. Three weeks from yesterday. They probably won’t want to stay around this area much longer than that. That is, if you’re right and they really intend to do it.”

“They’ll do it,” she said, in the tone of voice she might have used to say, everybody dies.

“We have three weeks to find out,” Dr. Godden said. “But if it’s still in such early stages, I don’t think you can really be as sure as you are. You know what I think it is?”

“The same old thing,” she said, smiling a bit shyly at the pattern in the carpet, knowing what he was going to say.

“You tell me,” he said, urging her gently.

“It’s the feeling of being undeserving,” she said. “The feeling that I don’t deserve to have anything good, so I won’t get anything good. I’m sure they’ll do it because I’m sure they’ll get caught and then I won’t have Stan. Because I don’t deserve Stan.” She sneaked a quick look at him, saw his sympathetic face, his balding head gleaming in the light. Looking quickly back at the carpet she said, “I know that’s part of it. But that isn’t the whole thing. I mean, Marty did get caught.”

“Once,” Dr. Godden said. “And how many times did he commit robberies and not get caught?”

“Oh, lots,” she said. She was no longer amazed at how easily she could talk with Dr. Godden about robberies and criminals. It was almost as though he were a priest; different, but sympathetic, never judging, never condemning, never trying to force her to conform to what society might want. How many people could she talk to about Marty, be truthful, tell them her ex-husband was a robber, it was his profession? Most people would be shocked, they’d want to call the police or at least to stop having anything to do with her. But Dr. Godden took everything just the same; calm and understanding and without judging. She could talk to him about anything, about sex or Marty or her parents or anything at all and it was never a problem.

Now, calm as ever, Dr. Godden was saying, “Then there’s no reason to believe they’ll be caught this time. After all, Stan is the only one among them who isn’t a professional at this sort of thing.”

“But even if they don’t get caught this time,” she said, exploring her fear further now, “it won’t be any good. Stan will want to do it again, he’ll want to become like Marty. Or like the other man, Parker.”

“I see,” Dr. Godden said. “You’re afraid Stan will turn out to be your first husband again.”

She nodded rapidly, frowning at the rug.

“That’s a not unusual fear among girls in your situation,” Dr. Godden said. “But frankly, from what you’ve told me of Stan I think it more likely one taste of that sort of life will be more than enough for him. Who knows, the experience might be good for him, he might come out of it much more likely husband material than he went in.”

It was wonderful how Dr. Godden always found a calmer way to look at things, a more pleasant way. And a lot of the time his way turned out to be right, and all her fears and doubts and premonitions turned out to be nothing but the old insecurity again, the old inadequacy and unworthiness.

“I guess,” she said hesitantly, “I guess the only thing we can do now is wait.”

“That’s all,” agreed Dr. Godden.

2

Stan took a shot of the vault, peeled the print out of the back of the camera, saw it had come out as well as the rest, and strolled on back to his desk. He tucked the photo into the envelope in his center drawer with the rest, put the camera back in the side drawer, and was typing away like sixty when Lieutenant Wormley came back in from the head.

“Don’t work so hard,” Wormley said on his way by. “It’s only Saturday.”

“Yes, sir,” said Stan. Wormley was a fuzzy-faced chinless wonder, an ROTC second lieutenant two years younger than Stan. He continued on down the rows of desks now, went into his own glass-enclosed cubicle next to Major Creighton’s office, and buried his face again in Scientific American. Stan had taken all his pictures except the vault shot while Wormley was lost strayed or stolen inside that magazine.

Sergeant Novato had been tougher to work around. A tough, compact little man who’d never expected assignment anywhere that required brainwork, he took the tasks of this office a hell of a lot more seriously than anybody else, and on the Saturdays when he was on duty he got more accomplished than most people did in a full eight-hour weekday. But it was his very busyness that had helped Stan to shoot around him. When Novato was bouncing around the files, in and out of one drawer after another, pulling this file, Putting that file back, Stan got his pictures of the other end of the office. And when Novato was down there, absorbed in arithmetic at his desk, Stan took his pictures in the other direction.

He’d already taken care of the exterior shots and the staircase on the way in, and the shot of the vault through the window of Major Creighton’s office finished the pictures he wanted from here. So now all he had to do was wait for twelve o’clock — another interminable forty-five minutes away — and then drive around the base a little to get the rest of the pictures Parker wanted. He’d be home by one-thirty at the latest.

It was a good thing Lanz had gone along with the switch. Otherwise it would have been tough to get these pictures for Parker. But Lanz had been happy to switch Saturdays with Stan — just to put off his own duty day — so here he was, and the pictures were done.

Nobody seemed to know why the Saturday morning skeleton staff was required, but then nobody seemed to know why the Air Force wanted almost anything done the way they did. It was just a fact of life, that’s all; on Saturday mornings one officer, one non-com and one airman had to be on duty from eight till noon. It was less trouble on the lower ranks than on the officers and non-coms, since there were more airmen to divvy up the duty among themselves, but it was still an occasional pain in the ass.

Stan’s next duty wasn’t scheduled for another five weeks, but Jerry Lanz had agreed to switch with him, and the two other people on duty this morning had turned out, in their separate ways, to be perfect for what Stan had in mind. He’d done a small amount of typing, a large amount of picture-taking, and all in all he considered the morning, unlike most of these stinking Saturdays, well spent.

Stan was enjoying all of this, the preparation, the talk, the gathering of professionals, the gearing up methodically and matter-of-factly for the one grand profitable moment of high drama. He had felt an affinity with Marty Fusco from the first, despite the difference in their ages, and that feeling was even stronger now with Parker. Parker was a man he would follow. He had seen and understood Parker’s mistrust of him when they’d first met, and had been delighted at the gradual shift in Parker’s attitude, until now he was sure Parker’s acceptance of him was almost complete.

That he should find his place at last at the side of a man like Parker didn’t surprise Stan Devers at all. For as long as he could remember he’d been a swimmer upstream, a rebel for the sake of rebellion, anti rules and anti dullness and anti everything that plain stolid ordinary society was for. He’d been thrown out of two high schools and one college — having already, in college, been thrown out of ROTC — he’d been fired from most of the jobs he’d ever held, and that he was surviving four years of Air Force regimentation without earning himself either a Bad Conduct or Undesirable Discharge sometimes amazed him. His troubles in the past had ranged from insubordination through constant absences to the theft of one high school teacher’s car — for a joyride only — and that he had held his natural tendencies in check for three and a half military years now meant not that he’d reformed but that he’d understood at once that the Air Force was a tougher proposition than any school. Hit a teacher and the worst you could get was thrown out. Hit an officer and they’d put you in jail for five years.

His mother had started prophesying jail for him years ago, when he was still in high school. Everything Stan had told Parker about his mother was true; they’d never gotten along and never would. She was now either on her fourth husband or looking for her fifth, he didn’t know or care which. Although he hadn’t really ever given his grandmother — or anybody else — any money, she had truly been the only relative he’d ever had any kind of friendly relationship with, and her death last year had hit him harder than he’d thought anything like that could do. He was now a loner partly by choice and partly by chance, and his being shacked up with Ellen Fusco didn’t to his way of thinking change his loner status a bit. If Ellen thought marriage was somewhere in their future, it wasn’t because he’d ever encouraged the notion. Nor had he contradicted it; it kept her generally tractable.

Until recently, that is. Until this robbery business had come up. Ever since then she’d been a truculent bitch, grousing around like some soap-opera Cassandra, snapping his head off at the slightest pretext. If he’d ever had any idea of taking her with him when he got out of the service, the last couple of weeks had put the kibosh on that. You’d think psychoanalysis would have made her more sensible.

Stan was brooding about this so much he forgot to look at the clock, and the next thing he knew Lieutenant Wormley was coming by his desk, rolled-up magazine in his hand, grinning and saying, “Stan, you’re becoming a positive company man. If the Major could only see you now.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan said. “I’m bucking for civilian.” There was a time when it would have grated on him to call a little punk like Wormley “sir”, but by now the word was automatic. It was one of the painless little things you did to get by, you called the Wormleys “sir”. And if “sir” had one definition for the Wormleys and another definition for Stan, a private definition all his own, that was Stan’s business.

Wormley had to lock up. He stood waiting at the door while Stan and Sergeant Novato got ready. Stan put the camera and the envelope full of photos into a brown paper bag and headed for the door.

Wormley nodded at the bag. “Taking home samples, Stan?”

“You bet, sir.” You bet, you simple son of a bitch.

3

“Stan took pictures of the office,” Ellen said.

“Oh?” Dr. Godden’s voice expressed polite interest. “Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know. That man Parker wanted him to. All kinds of pictures, not just of the office.”

“What else?”

“Oh, the gate, and the outside of the building where he works, and some trucks and buses and things.”

“Well, well” said Dr. Godden. “It does sound as though they’re serious, doesn’t it?”

“I knew they were.”

“It seems you were right,” said Dr. Godden. “Are they hiding their plans from you?”

“No, How could they, they’re using my house! As though I wanted to know what they were doing.”

“Don’t you?”

“I do not,” she told the carpet. “When they start talking, I leave the room right away.”

“Why is that?”

“I hate it!” she burst out, glaring at the patterns in the carpet. “I hate the thought of it, I hate everything they’re doing.”

“Is it only because you’re afraid they’ll be caught, or that Stan will want to keep doing it until he does get caught?”

“I don’t know. How do I know?” She knew she was getting agitated, but she couldn’t help it. “I just hate them being there, doing all that — all that.”

“Well, let’s think about it,” he said. “You say you hate them being there, making their preparations in your house. Is that the point? That it’s your house?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it could be.”

“Do you feel they are violating your hospitality? Or that Stan is betraying you somehow, entering into a plan with your ex-husband?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, frowning at the carpet, trying to think, trying to see if anything Dr. Godden was saying found a response inside her. He did that sometimes, offered one reason for a thing after another until they found the one she responded to, and that was usually it. Even if the response was strongly negative. In fact, if she were to say definitely no to something, nine times out of ten that would turn out to be what the reason was after all.

“Do you object,” he asked her now, “to your husband using your home? Or is this planning just reminiscent of the times when you were married to him, particularly the time when he did get caught?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked briefly directly at him, at those intelligent sympathetic eyes, and then away again.

“That’s it,” she said, knowing it was. “It makes me nervous, them all in the living room, just the way it used to be. I feel, I feel trapped, as though nothing was changed, I’m not really free of Marty after all.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “The reminiscence is there, the similarity with the past. But there are differences, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You are free of your ex-husband. He is there only on your sufferance. That’s a big difference, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes I think I ought to tell them to go someplace else.”

“No!”

He said it so forcefully she was surprised into looking at him again. For just a second his expression seemed to be startled, but then it smoothed again and he said, “Ellen, you can’t run away from things. We’ve talked about that before.”

“Yes,” she said, and faced front again. “I know. You’re right.”

“You should let them stay,” he said. “You should face the problem squarely, understand it, conquer it.”

“I know.”

“In fact,” he said, “you shouldn’t run away from their meetings. You should be present as much as they permit. You should listen to everything they say, you should know just as much of their plans as they do.” He paused, and said, “Do you know why?”

“To help me understand why I’m afraid?”

“That too, of course. But even more than that, you should know precisely what they plan to do, because if the plan is a good one you’ll be spared a great deal of unnecessary worry. Who knows, if you listened to what they have in mind you might find out it’s really a very good and safe plan, and then you’d have one less problem to worry about. Wouldn’t you?”

She smiled at the carpet. “I guess I would.”

“You can talk their plans over with me,” he told her. “Together we’ll try and decide if they can get away with what they intend to do.”

“What if we don’t think they can?” she asked.

“Then we’ll decide why,” he said. “We’ll discuss their ideas, and if we see things that look like flaws you can show them to Stan, either so they’ll make their plan better or so he’ll decide not to go ahead with it.”

“I don’t dare tell Stan,” she said, “that I’ve been talking about all this with you.”

“That’s understandable.”

“He wouldn’t believe I’m perfectly safe telling you anything,” she said. She looked at him, actually held his eyes this time. “Anything at all,” she said.

His smile was gentle, sympathetic. “I’m pleased you have confidence in me,” he said.

4

Fusco pulled the Pontiac into the cinder driveway beside the house. There was no garage, only the driveway, ending at a metal fence. The fence completely enclosed the back yard, which was perfect for Pam. The kid was out there every warm and rainless day, with the whole yard to roam in. A hell of a lot more than the chunk of Canarsie pavement Fusco had had when he was a kid.

Fusco shut the Pontiac door and walked over to the fence. There was Pam, all the way at the other end of the yard, squatting the way little kids do, digging in the dirt back there with a tablespoon Ellen had given her.

Ellen was a good mother, there was no denying it. Yeah, and she’d been a good wife, too. It was him that was off. As a husband he’d been punk, and as a father he was the kind of guy who could show up once a year with a balloon and a box of Cracker Jack and other than that have no idea what the hell he was supposed to do. It was a good thing Pam had a mother like Ellen.

The one thing Fusco couldn’t work out entirely was his feeling about Stan. It seemed to him he ought to be bugged by it one way or another. Stan shacked up with Ellen, but when he thought about it he didn’t feel bugged at all. What the hell, they weren’t married any more. And after three years in the pen, completely separated from her, he had practically no emotional involvement left for Ellen at all any more. Oh, a little, but he thought that was mostly because of the kid, because she was the one in charge of bringing up his daughter.

He liked to look at Pam. He liked to know she was there. But he shouldn’t hang around out here too long now. Without having called to the child or in any way attracted her attention, Fusco moved away from the fence, walked around the Pontiac, and went into the house by the front door.

It was a little after six, and Ellen was in the kitchen making dinner. Parker was sitting on the sofa, looking at Stan’s pictures spread out on the coffee table. Stan wasn’t around.

Parker looked up. “It work out?”

“Beautiful,” Fusco told him. “I sat at a table right next to a window, I could see everything happened at the gate. I had a book open in front of me, my notebook open, it looked like I was copying down stuff I was reading. Nobody paid me any attention at all.”

Stan came in from the bedroom then, saying, “Marty, tomorrow I get my car back. I hate that stinking bus.”

“I was going to be there longer than you,” Fusco reminded him.

“I know, I know.” Stan looked at Parker. “You want to go over his stuff now, or after dinner?”

“Whenever Fusco’s ready,” Parker said.

“Couple minutes,” Fusco said. He dropped his notebook on an end table and went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. He didn’t know why, but sitting in that library all day had made him stiff; his back creaked when he bent over the sink to wash his face.

When he came out, Parker and Stan had moved to the kitchen table and Ellen was dishing up supper. Parker and Fusco both were taking most of their meals here, but were sleeping elsewhere, Fusco at the residence hotel over Checkers’ Bar & Grill down on Front Street, Parker at the motel in Malone, fifteen miles away. Parker had the Pontiac every night, but always brought it back in the morning in time for Stan to take it to the base. Unless, like this morning, either Parker or Fusco had a use for the car.

Fusco sat down at the table and Ellen put a plate in front of him without a word, meatloaf, green beans, boiled potato. Starving, Fusco dug right in.

When Ellen sat down she said to Fusco, “How was your day?”

“Good,” he told her. “No trouble at all.”

“That’s good,” she said. In the last couple of days she’d gotten a lot better, a lot easier to get along with. She’d been all up in the air about this caper for a long time, but now all that seemed changed. Maybe she’d grown resigned to it, or maybe she’d just gotten interested in how the score was shaping up. Ever since Monday she’d been fine, listening to them talking things over, not bitching about anything. Stan had been understandably more relaxed himself as a result.

Fusco liked it when people were relaxed. He hated trouble in the air, interpersonal hang-ups. It was much better now, the four of them sitting around the kitchen table together, Stan telling funny stories about some kid second lieutenant in his office. Fusco had two helpings of everything.

Afterwards, back in the living room, Fusco reported on his day, giving the names and times of all the commercial vehicles in and out of the South Gate, the quantity of passenger cars at different times of day, what Air Force vehicles used that gate in and out. At the end he said, “There were two trucks went out that gate but didn’t come in, at least not while I was there. One was a garbage truck, green, said S & L Sanitation Service on the side, went through at three-twenty. The other was a Pepsi-Cola truck, went through at four thirty-five. I figure they both must of come in the main gate, went through some kind of set route, and then they go out this way.”

Parker said, “What kind of check do the commercial trucks get?”

“They must have some kind of pass,” Fusco told him. “Every one of them stopped, the driver held something out for the kid on the gate to look at, and then the kid waved him through.”

“In and out both?”

“Right.”

“Nobody got waved through? Not even people going to be the same every day? The gate guards have to know some of those drivers.”

Fusco shook his head. “Everybody stopped. No exceptions.”

Stan told Parker, “There’s some chicken outfit goes around trying to crack security on Air Force bases. They hit here three or four months ago, and the story went all over the base. One of their men came in in a Coke company truck, put a red brick with ‘bomb’ stenciled on it in white in every Coke machine on the base. Then called up the Provost Marshal and told him the whole base had just blown up.”

Parker shook his head. “That’s beautiful. So now they’re bright and alert. Just to make things tougher.”

Fusco said. “We wouldn’t count on them being slack anyway. It doesn’t change anything.” He still had a small fear that Parker would suddenly decide the job was no good after all, and up and walk out. Parker was capable of something like that, if he didn’t like the set-up.

But it wasn’t going to happen now, not over the gate guards. Parker nodded agreement with what Fusco had said, and turned to Stan, saying, “What time does the payroll get to the base?”

“To the base, or to our office?”

“Both. Base first.”

“The plane lands at nine-twenty. The money gets into the finance office no later than quarter to ten.”

“When does it start getting split up?”

“Right away. Six guys work on it all day long.”

“They work after hours?”

Stan grinned. “No, they get it done by five. I know, I’m one of the six, all we want is to be done and out of there by five o’clock.”

“Where’s this happen?”

Stan picked up one of the photos on the coffee table and handed it over to Parker. “In the Major’s office there. Where the vault is. See those two long tables along the left wall? That’s where we sit.”

“And the two boxes with the money?”

“In front,” Stan said. “Next to the glass wall here.”

“Is that glass bulletproof?”

“No, it’s just regular plate glass.”

“But the windows back here are barred.”

Stan shrugged. “That’s the way the Air Force does things.”

Ellen came quietly in at that point, carrying a cup of coffee for herself, and sat unobtrusively in the chair in the corner.

Parker said, “Besides the six men working on the payroll, who else is upstairs then?”

“Everybody who works up there,” Stan said. “About twenty people.”

“Anybody else in the room with the money?”

“The Major. And Lieutenant Wormley and Captain Henley. They both check out .45’s from Supply in the morning and stand around and play guard.”

“Describe them.”

“Wormley and Henley?” Stan shrugged. “Wormley’s like his name. A little creep, fresh out of ROTC. A nothing.”

“What about Henley?”

“He’s supposed to be an alcoholic,” Stan said. “I don’t know. He lives with his family in the dependent housing area, he’s got lots of kids, he’s in his forties, I hear he was passed over for major once, he likes to reminisce about when he was in Europe in the Second World War.”

“Does he know how to use a gun?”

Stan shrugged. “Beats me. All officers are supposed to be checked out on the .45. I figure Wormley just went to the firing range and shut his eyes and plugged away till they told him to stop. Maybe Henley did do some stuff in the Big War, I don’t know.”

Fusco had been listening, trying to figure out the characters of the men from Stan’s descriptions. He was pretty good at that, at working out what kind of a man somebody was and guessing what that kind of man would do in such a situation. Now he said, “That’s the one to look out for. Henley.”

Stan didn’t understand. He looked at Fusco and said, “The war was a long time ago.”

“Not for anything he learned in the war,” Fusco said. “If he’s a passed-over captain, maybe twenty-five years in the service, got a family, drinks too much, maybe he’s out to prove himself. Maybe he’d like to be a hero and make major.”

Stan squinted, thinking about it. “Henley? You just could be right. He does get belligerent sometimes.”

Parker said, “What about the Major? Who’s he?”

“Major Creighton,” Stan said. “Kind of a nice guy, grandfather type, easygoing, got a little white moustache. The WAFs say he’s always trying to cop a feel, but all I know is he sits in his office and looks at everybody working and doesn’t seem to give much of a damn.”

Parker said, “No other guards?”

“Not during the day. They come on at five o’clock, when we quit. I think they work two shifts, they must change around midnight or something. I’m not sure how that works.”

“All right. What time does the money leave the next morning?”

“First thing. About five or ten after eight. It goes down into the armored car and that’s the end of it.”

“The question is,” said Fusco, “do we want to go after it in the daytime the day before, or wait until night?”

“We can’t decide that yet,” Parker said.

“Yes we can,” said Stan. “You’ll have to do it in the daytime. You don’t dare try to move around that base at night. Besides, in the daytime all the guards are Wormley and Henley. Whatever Henley’s like, he’s an amateur at being a guard. At night, you’ve got APs to tackle, inside and out.”

“If we do it in the daytime,” Parker told him, “and there’s static, you’ll have to play it like we aren’t on your team. And we’ll have to play it that way, too.”

“You won’t have to gun me down,” Stan said, grinning.

“I know that. But you want to be there in uniform when we do it, with twenty witnesses around?”

“I’ll just stand there with my hands up,” Stan said, and stuck his hands into the air.

Fusco said, “Stan’s right, the daytime is our only chance. At least, that’s what I think.”

Parker seemed to be considering it. He picked up a couple of the photos, looked at them, put them down. “A daylight haul is tougher,” he said. “Let’s let it ride for a while. We’ll figure either way, day or night, we’re going to need three more men, including a driver. That’s six men, equal shares. You say there’s four hundred grand in the kitty?”

Stan said, “About that. A little more, a little less, it changes every payday.”

“About sixty-five thousand each,” Fusco said.

“We can build up an A string for that,” Parker said. He looked at Fusco. “You got any ideas?”

Fusco had. “There was a guy I met on the inside,” he said. “He was only in because he was finked on. He’d be out by now. He looked solid and dependable, and he knew a lot of the same guys we do.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jake Kengle.”

Parker shook his head. “I don’t know him. You know how to get in touch with him?”

“He gave me an address before I got out.”

“Give him a try. You know Philly Webb?”

“Sure,” said Fusco. “He drove for me once in Norfolk, he’s a good man.”

“I’ll contact him,” Parker said.

Fusco said, “What about that foreign guy? Salsa. He still around?”

“Dead,” Parker said, “Couple of years ago.”

From her corner, Ellen surprisingly said, “Bill Stockton’s always good.”

“That’s right,” Fusco said. To Parker he said, “You remember Stockton, don’t you? Tall, skinny as a flagpole, black hair straight up on top of his head. Sharpshooter.”

“I remember him,” Parker said. “You want to contact him, or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” Fusco said. “You see about financing.”

Stan said, “Financing? What’s that?”

Fusco explained to him: “We’ll have expenses beforehand. Guns maybe. A car, other things. We get financing from somebody outside, he gets back double if the caper works.”

“Why don’t we finance ourselves?”

Parker said, “If the money man is involved it tends to make for trouble. He starts acting like he’s got extra votes. It’s better to have it done on the outside.”

Fusco said, “The reason I thought you ought to handle that, Parker, money men tend to shy away from somebody been on the inside. Superstitious or something.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Parker said. To Stan he said, “How can we mount a night watch on the South Gate, same as what Fusco just did?”

“That’s easy,” Stan said. “I just sit there in a car. Nobody’ll bother about me.”

“We’ll need it from eleven-thirty tonight till about four tomorrow morning,” Parker said.

“Tonight?” Stan’s grin turned pained. “I forgot,” he said, “about never volunteering.”

Fusco said, “I’ll come long if you want, Stan, help keep you company.”

Stan pointed a finger at him. “You just volunteered, pal,” he said.

Parker said, “One of you can drive me back to the motel first, and come pick me up in the morning.”

Ellen said, “You could stay here tonight.” There was nothing suggestive in her voice, or in her face when Fusco looked at her, nothing but a flat statement and an expressionless face, but Fusco felt the shock go through the room, felt Stan tensing, felt himself going taut, and he was amazed at how relieved he was when Parker answered, just as flatly, “I’d rather stick to the routine.”

Fusco got to his feet, suddenly in a hurry to break up this meeting. “I’ll take you, Parker,” he said.

“Good,” Parker said, “See you in the morning, Stan.”

“See you,” said Stan. The moment was over.

5

“Do you know what strikes me as significant?” Dr. Godden said.

Ellen had been silent the last three or four minutes, just sitting there with her arms around herself, her eyes fixed on the patterns in the carpet, her mind churning as she tried to find something to talk about and there continued to be nothing, nothing at all. Dr. Godden always told her not to worry about the silences, to be silent when she felt like being silent and talk only when she felt like talking, but she hated to have the time go by and her not saying anything to him, not accomplishing anything with him. They’d done so much good together already she was impatient to get on with the job, to accomplish everything, to make everything as good as it could possibly be.

This was one of the few times he’d ever broken into one of her silences, and it surprised her almost enough to make her look at him. She checked the head movement in time, turned it into a negative shake, and said, “No, I don’t.”

“You can’t think of anything to talk about,” he said. “And I would guess that’s because you’re trying very hard not to think about a particular subject. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know,” she said, though the suggestion did make her tense. “I can’t think of any subject.”

“You can’t? Well, here it is Monday the twenty-first, and do you know the last time you mentioned the robbery to me? Exactly one week ago. Last Monday. Not a word since then. Wednesday you talked about your mother, Friday you talked about your baby, and today you haven’t been able to talk about anything. But the robbery is a scant ten days away, and up until last Monday it was a very strong and important subject to you.”

He stopped talking and that meant she had to say something, had to respond in some way. She searched frantically for words, finally muttered, “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t have anything to say about it any more.”

“Have you been attending their meetings, as I suggested?”

“Yes.”

“Listening to their plans?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that something to talk about? Their plans?”

“I guess so.” She shrugged awkwardly, her face twisted by concentration. “I guess I just don’t want to think about it anymore,” she said.

“You mean you don’t listen to their plans?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you still are interested, you do still think about it. But you don’t want to talk about it. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He began to throw out hypotheses, the way he always did. “Could it be because you don’t trust me? Or because you now think the plan will work and you were foolish to have worried so much? Or because you now feel attraction again for your husband? Or perhaps for the other man, Parker?”

“No!” she said, so loudly and abruptly she surprised herself. Then she sat there and listened to the word, echoing and reverberating and revealing her to herself, and she saw that she had been staring at one corner of carpet because a line there, a series of lines there, reminded her vaguely of Parker’s face in profile, cold and hard and aloof.

“What is Parker to you?” Dr Godden said, “Is he the parent, the stern parent? Is he the father?”

“Cold,” she said, not entirely sure if she meant Parker or herself or both, or even how many different ways she might mean it about either of them.

“The one you don’t deserve?”

“Wednesday,” she said, talking in a monotone, almost a whisper, “Stan was going to be out all night. I asked Parker to stay overnight. I didn’t make it sexy, I just asked him. I didn’t know that’s what I meant, but it was. I’m not sure if he knew.”

“Did he stay?”

“No. He left, and I felt relieved. I was glad he hadn’t stayed, but I’d had to ask him.”

“You were relieved to discover you were still unworthy?”

“I suppose so, I’m not sure.”

“What do you feel about this man Parker now?”

“I think I hate him,” she said. “I’m afraid of him.”

“Because he would be justified in punishing you for your hatred,” he suggested. “Because he has done nothing to you directly to justify your hating him. That’s why you’re afraid, the fear is a way of feeling guilt.”

Sometimes the answers were too complicated for her. All she could do now was shake her head.

“Perhaps on Wednesday,” he said, “you’ll feel like talking about the robbery again. Perhaps you’ll understand your feelings better then.”

“I’ll talk about it now,” she said. “Now that I understand this, I want to talk about it, honestly.”

“There’s no time now,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound quite as sympathetic as usual. “We’ll see what happens on Wednesday.”

Now she did feel guilty. She’d been keeping the plans from Dr. Godden for no reason, making him feel she didn’t trust him, causing a rift between them just when she needed him the most. “I’ll tell you the whole thing on Wednesday,” she promised.

“If you feel like it,” he said.

6

Norman Berridge surveyed the body and found it good. The rouge on the cheeks was perhaps a trifle too noticeable, particularly for a sixty-three-year-old man, but relatives tended not to be overly particular about things like that. Just so none of the lip stitching showed or anything actually disastrous along that line, almost any kind of slapdash cosmetology was acceptable. And with the kind of assistant one had to rely on these days, that was just as well.

Ah, well, no need to raise a fuss. It was acceptable. Good, in fact. He said so to the assistant standing proudly beside the body, a young Puerto Rican apprentice — Puerto Ricans were about the only ones who would accept proper apprentice wages any more, in this mollycoddled twentieth-century USA — who accepted the compliment with a good deal of pleased hand-fluttering and head-bowing, while his own cheeks got as red as the corpse’s.

The wall phone in the corner buzzed. Norman Berridge walked around remains and assistant, picked up the phone, and his secretary said, “There’s a man here to see you, Mr Berridge. He says his name is Lynch, he says it’s about the annuities.”

Berridge pursed his lips. He recognized the name, and the use of the word “annuities”. Lynch was one of the men who came to him from time to time for financing of their activities. It was pleasant to have an area of investment offering — at some financial risk, of course — one hundred per cent profit and no involvement other than the initial outlay, but the men with whom he dealt in these matters never failed to unnerve him, and Lynch was possibly the most unnerving of them all. A cold man, as self-contained and silent as a panther, he seemed to Berridge always to be looking on him with contempt for his flabby body and bad nerves and jumbled mind. Lynch himself was as clean and cold and empty as the interior of a new coffin.

Lynch was not of course the man’s real name. One time when he had come with another man, the other had called him by a different name, which Berridge could no longer be sure he remembered. Porter, Walker, Archer... something like that.

No matter. It wasn’t the man’s name that counted, it was the opportunity he presented for investment. “I’ll be right up,” Berridge said into the phone, hung it up, and turned back to see the assistant dabbing at his body’s cheek, apparently having himself noticed it was a bit too red for someone not a habitué of Moulin Rouge. “Very good,” Berridge said. “Very good.”

He turned away from the assistant’s redoubled smile of pleasure and went over to the elevator, a small cage barely large enough for two. Shutting the gate, riding up to the main floor, Berridge reminded himself of his frequent vow to start using the stairs. Exercise was all he needed, and soon he’d have back the body of his twenties. Exercise, and some small restraint in diet. Nothing to it.

But he didn’t want to be panting when he walked into the room containing Lynch. Next time he was in the basement would be soon enough to start the new regimen. For now, his self-possession in Lynch’s presence would be greatly improved if his breathing were normal. Thus, the elevator.

Lynch was standing by the window when Berridge entered his office, gazing without expression at the formal garden Mrs Berridge maintained behind the house. It seemed to Berridge that Lynch never sat down, that their infrequent meetings in this office were always held with Lynch on his feet, as hard as a post.

This time, Berridge decided, he would also remain standing. It would make up a bit for the elevator.

“Lynch,” he said, as though pleased to see the man. “It’s been quite some time.” The false amiability and unction he had learned in dealing with bereaved relatives stood him well in other situations as well, most particularly this one. None of his true ambivalence about Lynch — money versus discomfort — showed in his voice or face.

Lynch turned away from the window, nodded briefly, and said, “I need three thousand.”

There was no small talk in Lynch, no social nicety. The man was as stripped and purposeful as a racing car or a fighter plane.

Which was just as well, actually. The last thing Berridge wanted was to know the specifics of the usage to which his money was to be put, and the next to the last thing was idle conversation with this man over some standard subject like the weather.

So Berridge, ordinarily an expansive and loquacious man, matched Lynch’s brevity with his own, saying, “No problem at all. The usual terms, I suppose?”

“Right. If it comes off, you’ll hear in about ten days.”

“About the first of the month?”

“Just after. Second or third, something like that.”

“Excellent. You want it now, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Care to come with me to the bank?”

Lynch nodded, and moved away from the window. Berridge, pleased with himself for not having seated himself behind his mahogany desk, led the way out of the office and down the rear hall to the garage, where he pushed the button that opened the third door along, the one for the Toronado. Past that was his daughter’s Mustang, while on this side were the Cadillac and his wife’s Volkswagen. The hearse and flower car were kept in another garage, beside the house.

Berridge felt good behind the wheel of his Toronado, young and vital. He had noticed that just about every other Toronado driver he had ever seen was, like himself, middle-aged and portly, but this didn’t interfere with the illusion of youth the car gave him. He was as capable of doublethink as anyone.

His money, for instance. He considered himself an honest and upright and patriotic man, he detested beatniks and peaceniks and other antisocial freaks as much as anyone, and if his income-tax statements were annual pieces of remarkably baroque fiction that was no contradiction at all, but merely another facet of his character, the hardheaded businessman facet. Poorer families tended to pay morticians in cash; cash was untraceable; untraceable income would only be reported by fools; Norman Berridge was nobody’s fool. If in a safety-deposit box in a bank downtown there were wads of wrinkled bills, just as they had come to him from the hands of his clientele, that was simply one way of an ordinary person’s defending himself from the encroachments of Big Government.

And if that money was occasionally doubled — and occasionally lost, too — by investment in the unspecified activities of men like Lynch, so what? Since when was investment a crime?

There was no conversation on the ride downtown. Berridge was painfully conscious of Lynch on the seat beside him, but he knew none of the awareness or discomfort showed. He drove, a little too slowly and too cautiously, through the slight mid-morning traffic, angle-parked the car at a parking meter just down the block from the bank, and said, “I’ll be right back.”

Lynch said nothing to that, which was typical of the man.

Berridge agonized over whether or not to put a dime in the meter. Would Lynch consider him effete if he did, or slovenly if he didn’t? Contempt seemed possible in either case.

The problem was solved for him when he put his hand in his change pocket; he had no dimes. He walked on by the meter and down to the bank.

He enjoyed the complexity involved in reaching his box, the gates to be gone through, the form to sign, the dignified obsequiousness of the guard, the necessity of both the guard’s key and his own being inserted in the box at the same time. It all gave him a feeling of importance, and of safety. And the value so obviously conferred on his safety deposit box seemed to rub off on him as well, giving him a feeling that he himself was considered valuable. All in all, a satisfying experience and a welcome antidote to ten minutes in the silent company of Lynch.

Berridge requested and got a large manila envelope. Carrying this and his box, he entered one of the private chambers, sat at the table there, and counted out fifties and twenties and an occasional ten until he had reached three thousand. The bills stuffed the manila envelope, which he could barely seal shut. Then there was the reverse procedure to go through, returning the box to its place and himself to the outside air.

When he returned to the car, Lynch was smoking, the air inside the car acrid with the smell of smoke. Unobstrusively Berridge turned on the air conditioner when he started the engine. Meantime Lynch ripped open the envelope and began to count the bills. He counted as Berridge drove homeward again, his absorption undisturbed by Berridge’s progress through the streets. Each little handful, when counted, went into another of Lynch’s pockets until when he was done, the envelope was empty, the money was out of sight, and Lynch looked exactly the same as before.

When Berridge was stopped by a red light, Lynch extended a crumpled twenty towards him, saying, “You counted wrong.”

“I did?” Surprised, Berridge took the bill, and didn’t notice the light had turned green until the car behind him sounded its horn. Then he drove the rest of the way with the bill clutched in his right hand.

When they reached the house — large, white stucco, with well-tended plantings all around and a discreet black-with-gray-letters sign on the lawn — Lynch said, “Let me off in front.”

“Certainly.”

Lynch didn’t say goodbye. Berridge watched him cross the street and get into a Pontiac with a New York State plate. Stolen? He had no idea.

After Lynch drove away, Berridge drove the Toronado back into the garage, the door opening for him at his approach. Once inside, seeing the manila envelope crumpled on the seat beside him, he permitted himself to become annoyed at Lynch, at his silence, his cold arrogance, his sloppiness in leaving that envelope there.

Berridge looked at the twenty-dollar bill still in his hand. Lynch had only counted the money once. Why had he been so sure it was Berridge who had made the error?

Berridge’s stomach felt bad.

7

“I’m not upset about Parker any more,” Ellen said.

“Oh? Very good.”

“All I feel for him now is dislike,” she said, and she knew her voice was calm with her certainty.

“I’m glad things are simpler now,” Dr. Godden said. “What made the change?”

“Different things,” she said. “I know that. There was a time when I would have known only one of them, but now I know there’s others.”

“What’s the one you would have known?”

“What he did with the guns,” she said. Then, realizing she’d started somewhere in the middle and he couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, she hurried on, “You remember Wednesday I told you he’d gone somewhere and gotten a lot of money. The money to finance things.”

“Yes. I found that very interesting. The reasons for getting the financing on the outside and so on.”

“Well, yesterday,” she said, “he got the guns. They’re in toy boxes, model auto racing sets and like that.”

“How many guns?”

“Two machine guns and four pistols. All so innocent, packed up in toy boxes. Stan said he got them from a man who runs a hobby shop as a cover for selling illegal guns.”

“And the guns bothered you?”

“Not the guns,” she said. “What he did with them.”

“What did he do with them?”

“He put them on the shelf in Pam’s closet.” Ellen closed her eyes, hugged herself closer. She could see them sitting there, on the shelf in her baby’s room, surrounded by truly innocent toys, all that lethal metal hidden away inside cardboard boxes covered with bright colors and gay lettering and pictures of happy things.

“Don’t you see?” she said, but she kept her own eyes closed. “He’s using Pam. Not just me, not just my house or Stan or even Marty. He’s using Pam, making her innocence hide his — filth.”

“You feel violated,” Dr. Godden suggested.

She opened her eyes, studied the patterned carpet as though the twisting lines would only form letters and words and sentences if she could but look at them right, as though the carpet could tell her something of great importance that would make everything clear and easy and possible. But the pattern remained only twisting lines.

“Not violated,” she said, “not exactly violated. It’s as though I didn’t matter, as though whether I was even alive or not had no meaning at all. He doesn’t care. I’m a worm to him, less than a worm. Nothing to him. Not even worth feeling contempt toward.”

“In other words,” Dr. Godden said, “for the first time you’ve met someone else who has the same attitude toward you that you have. The attitude you think is the only thing you deserve.”

She frowned at the rug. “Is that it?”

“Of course,” he said. “But when you treated yourself that way, you always knew you had the choice, you could stop treating yourself that way whenever you wanted. But when this man Parker gives you the same treatment it’s out of your control. He isn’t even doing it to expiate your guilt. Your guilt has nothing to do with the way he acts.”

“He doesn’t care what I think,” she said. “He doesn’t care. Everybody cares. You might hate somebody, but you care what they think, you want to know what they think.”

Dr. Godden let the silence stretch this time, and she knew that meant she was supposed to look inside and see if there was anything else there, anything she was trying to hide from herself. “It isn’t really Pam I’m angry about, is it?” she said. “It isn’t even me, not the real me.”

“No?” he asked gently. “What is it, then?”

“The mask I’m wearing,” she said. “Motherhood. You know, the good mother bit, the whole cop-out to make up for everything I’ve done wrong all my life. You know, how now I’m a mother and I hide behind that. And Parker doesn’t pay any attention to the mask. He goes ahead and puts the guns in Pam’s closet and doesn’t even ask me. The whole mother mask doesn’t mean a thing to him.”

“You think he sees through it?”

“I think,” she said, “I think he doesn’t give a damn.”

“What about Stan? Do you think he cares about Stan?”

“Parker? He doesn’t care about anybody except his own sweet self.”

Dr. Godden said, “Then perhaps he’ll arrange the robbery so he’ll be the only one to get away.”

“Do you think so?” she said, alarmed.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

She studied the question, trying to be fair, and finally said, “No, that isn’t how he’d be. He’s cold and ruthless and he doesn’t care about anybody, but that’s because he cares about things. Not even the money, I don’t think. It’s the plan that really matters to him. I think the thing that counts is doing it and having it come out right. So he wouldn’t want anybody else to be caught.”

“It would be unprofessional.”

“Yes. Oh, they found a hideout.”

“Did they?”

“Out Hilker Road. A hunting lodge up near the border that got burned down a couple of years ago.”

“Andrews’ Lodge?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. They went up there yesterday to look it over.”

“Then the plan is set?”

“Not entirely, I don’t think. Maybe in Parker’s mind it’s all set, but they haven’t talked about it all yet. I guess they’re waiting for the others to come in.”

“How many more?”

“Three. They’re supposed to come in by Monday night, I think. So I guess I won’t have much to tell you next time. But lots on Wednesday.”

“That’s when they’ll be doing it.” Dr. Godden said.

Ellen shivered.

8

Jake Kengle unlocked his way into his furnished room, threw his briefcase on the bed, and got the bottle of whiskey out of the bottom dresser drawer. He went to the bathroom for a glass, half-filled it, and sat down on the bed to ease his feet while he slowly drank. The briefcase sat beside him, fat and black, sternly demanding he go back to work.

The hell with it. The double hell with it. He sipped at his whiskey, he looked moodily out the window at the airshaft with its gray brick wall five feet away, and he found some small pleasure in anticipating how good it was going to feel when he finally bent over and removed his shoes. His feet tingled inside the shoes, enjoying already their coming freedom. The liquor burned warm down his throat, slightly watering his eyes. The tension across his shoulders very gradually eased.

When he did at last bend forward to remove his shoes he saw out of the corner of his eye the briefcase again, still squatting there on the bed. In sudden rage he picked it up and hurled it across the room, generally in the direction of the window and the airshaft. His aim was way off; the briefcase hit the front of the dresser and thudded to the floor. Kengle left it there.

The briefcase contained something called a “presentation”. A lot of brightly colored sheets of glossy paper, that meant; two expensive-looking loose-leaf folders, all telling how great some damn encyclopedia was.

Why would anybody buy an encyclopedia? Kengle didn’t know. He’d been ringing doorbells day and night since Tuesday on this damn job, and here it was Saturday afternoon, and he hadn’t yet found anybody stupid enough to fork over three hundred bucks for a bunch of books. And the commission on zero sales is zero dollars.

It was a stinking way to make a buck, trying to sell things door-to-door on commission. But the good ways to make a buck, the soft and easy ways, they didn’t show up all that often for the guy with a record. “In your employment resume, Mr Kengle, you give no employer for the last fifty-two months. Why is that?”

“I was in prison.”

“Oh? Mmmmmmmm.”

He’d gotten out the first of September, and here it was the twenty-sixth already, and so far he’d landed two jobs, one peddling a food-freezer plan on commission and now this book thing. He’d been lucky the second day with the freezer plan, found a family that had just moved into this stinking town and had friends with a freezer plan, so they were what the boys called pre-sold. Sixty bucks commission. Then he’d gone the next ten days without a nibble, got into a stupid argument with Nettleton, the sales manager, and that was the end of that.

And how long is sixty bucks supposed to carry a guy? Monday they’d start bitching about the rent on this place, and he just didn’t have it. So then what?

The trouble was, he wasn’t a penny-ante boy. He could hustle into a big-time caper, cut ten or twenty thousand for himself, handle his action with no trouble. But cop some old lady’s purse in the park for six dollars and thirty-seven cents? He’d never done it, he had no taste for it, and it seemed to him an ignominious thing to get the collar for. So it looked as though he was going to sit here in this room — or out in the street, if they threw him out of the room — and starve, because he couldn’t turn an honest dollar and wouldn’t turn a dishonest nickel.

The briefcase lay on the floor like a legless bug on its back. The sales manager — Smith, this one’s name was, and as phony a bastard as Nettleton — had told him the weekend was always a hot time for book sales, because of husbands and kids being home. Well, it had been crap so far today, and here it was three in the afternoon. So should he go fight it some more? Who the hell works on Saturday afternoon? Or Saturday evening, or all day Sunday? Ex-cons trying to make a commission buck, that’s who.

If that bastard lawyer hadn’t used up every penny of his stake in useless appeals things wouldn’t be so bad now. He could sit back, relax, live small but comfortable until somebody showed up with something. But no. He had to hustle books like some baggy-pants straight man in burlesque.

He finished the liquor in the glass, got to his feet and padded in his socks over to the dresser. He was reaching for the bottle when somebody knocked on the door.

Weren’t they going to wait till Monday? All set to blow his top, Kengle went over and opened the door, and there stood a tall skinny kid in an undershirt. “Phone for you,” he said, and trotted away down the hall.

This was a sweet place. One telephone on each floor, in the hall near the elevator, and a pay phone at that. When it rang it was up to anybody who heard it to go answer it and pass the word to whoever it was for. That was the kind of privacy Kengle loved.

Kengle locked his door and walked down the hall to the phone. Maybe it was Smith, checking to see if he was out hustling those books. If so, screw Smith.

The voice said, “Jake?”

Kengle recognized it, and a heavy weight seemed to lift off his back. The voice belonged to Ed Dant, who ran a fleabag hotel in Atlanta and who was Kengle’s permanent address. Anybody in the business who wanted to contact him knew to call Ed Dant, who did the same thing for half a dozen other guys. When he’d moved into this place here Kengle had telegraphed Ed the address and phone number right away, because when the break came it would be coming through a call from Ed.

Keeping all trace of excitement out of his voice, Kengle said, “What’s new, pal?”

“Nothing much. Just to say hello, glad to hear you’re out, see how you’re doing.”

“Fine. Got a steady job.”

“Glad to hear it. Ran into an old friend of yours the other day. Remember Marty Fusco?”

“Sure. How’s he doing these days?”

“Working here and there. He thought he might drop by and see you tomorrow. I wasn’t sure I had the address right, so I told him I’d call him back.”

Kengle reeled off his address.

They talked a little more, saying nothing, and then ended the conversation. Kengle was grinning from ear to ear when he walked back down the hall and unlocked his way into his room.

One corner of his brain said, What if the set-up’s no good?

Aloud he said, “It’s gotta be better than peddling books.”

He made one concession to good sense. He opened the window before throwing the briefcase into the airshaft.

9

“Maybe I ought to tell the police,” Ellen said. She was hugging herself so hard her arms hurt.

“I don’t think you should,” Dr. Godden said carefully. “I think you’re carrying around enough guilt feelings as it is.”

“It’s tonight,” she said. She was shivering, trembling, no matter how hard she hugged herself.

“If Stan had had his way,” Dr. Godden reminded her, “it would have been happening right now.”

“Nobody has their way against Parker,” she said. “I hate him.”

“I believe we correctly analyzed Stan on Monday,” Dr. Godden said. “He wanted a daylight robbery so that he could not be asked to take an active part in it.”

“If I told the police it was going to happen,” she said, “but didn’t tell them who was going to do it, and then somehow I let Stan know they knew about it—”

“You couldn’t do it,” he told her. “Not without implicating yourself. And then Stan would merely hate you.”

“But there’s no way out! If they get caught, that’s terrible, and if they don’t get caught he’ll want to do it again and that’s terrible.”

“We still can’t be sure he’ll want to do it again,” Dr. Godden said, his voice soothing her though she still trembled. “After all, if he didn’t want to take an active part this time it means he’s had some second thoughts already, he’s somewhat afraid now. After the reality of the experience he may decide he never wants to go through anything like that again. We can’t tell one way or the other until he’s actually gone through it.”

“But what if they get caught?”

“Let’s go over the plan,” he said, “and see if we can find any loopholes, anything Parker and the others haven’t thought of. We’ve discussed various parts of the plan from time to time, but we’ve never taken it through from beginning to end. Let’s do that now.”

“All right,” she said. Her voice began to drone.

10

Dr. Godden stood in the doorway, watched Ellen Fusco go out through the outer office, and then motioned to the slender young man on the Naugahyde sofa to come in.

The young man, whose face was covered with acne, got to his feet, said nastily, “Ralph’s late again,” and sauntered into the inner office. He sat on the sofa there, spread his legs out, folded his arms and said, “Ralph’s always late.”

Dr. Godden shut the door, controlled his impulse to speak harshly, and went over to sit in his accustomed chair at the end of the sofa. “That’s a problem of Ralph’s,” he said. “Perhaps after a while he’ll get over it.”

“Soon everyone will be perfect,” said the young man. He always strove for sarcasm but never attained anything other than petulance.

His name was Roger St. Cloud, he was twenty-two years old, militarily unsuitable because of some problem with his inner ear, the only son of well-to-do parents — his father had a controlling interest in Monequois First Savings — and a classic bundle of insecurities and neuroses masked by a juvenile nastiness of manner. The clothing he wore — sneakers without socks, filthy chinos, a ratty turtleneck sweater — was intended to infuriate his parents, and it succeeded. It was the positive relish with which Roger’s parents rose to every bait the boy tossed them that made Dr. Godden’s work so much more necessary and at the same time so much more difficult. If he could get the parents in here for regular treatments it might have some good effect on the son, but of course they’d never agree to anything like that.

Well, for the purpose at hand what was needed was not the parents but the son. Dr. Godden said, out of the sense of duty that had been troubling him of late, “While we wait for Ralph, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

Roger shrugged carelessly, which always meant yes, always meant there was something he felt about so strongly that the feeling embarrassed him and therefore had to be denied. “Had another dream,” he said.

“The dragon?” That was the dream about his mother.

“No, none of the usual. A new one.”

“Ah? What was it?”

“I was walking down a rifle barrel. It was like a tunnel, you know? But it was a rifle barrel, and I was walking toward the bullets. I could look back the other way and see daylight at the hole. It was very realistic, with the shiny metal color and everything. It was cold in there. Then I looked back and there was an eye down at the far end looking at me. It was my father, and he said, ‘You’ll never get away.’ But he was big, he was normal size for the rifle, so he couldn’t get at me. But he kept looking in, his eye there, and I shouted, ‘Get out of the way! You’ll be killed when the gun goes off!’ But he wouldn’t believe me. Then there was a boom, like an explosion. Not like a rifle shot at all. A real explosion. And I looked and there was a bullet coming toward me. It looked like a train in a tunnel, except it filled it all the way around, there wasn’t any place to squeeze in and let it go by. And the front was all fat and squashed. I started running away, but I was slow, it turned slow-motion, you know, the way they do. But the bullet was slow, too, it was just behind me but it couldn’t catch up. And my father’s eye was still up at the other end, he wouldn’t get out of the way. I kept hollering at him, but he wouldn’t get out of the way.”

In the course of telling all this, Roger’s voice had lost its usual whine, his expression had calmed, and he had shown briefly who it was he might have been if things had been different. But now his face twisted back into its usual expression, the whine came into his voice again, and he shrugged negligently, saying, “That’s when I woke up.”

“Not hard to interpret, that dream,” Dr Godden suggested.

“Easy. I’m afraid of getting caught and I’m afraid of getting killed.”

“And you re also afraid that if you do get caught your disgrace will also ruin your father.”

Roger shrugged.

The door burst open and Ralph lumbered in. A tall, heavyset, very strong man of thirty-two, he gave an appearance of flabbiness and weakness that was totally misleading. His strength was hampered by clumsiness, his appearance altered by the way he stooped and shambled, but within the self-negating mannerisms was a strong and capable body waiting to be unleashed.

“I ran,” Ralph said, panting, and thudded over to drop heavily onto the sofa beside Roger.

“You always run,” Roger commented.

Ralph never took offense at Roger’s comments. Why should he, when he believed he deserved them? Ralph believed that he was stupid, and that stupidity was a crime. Any asset he might have, such as a strong body or a handsome face, had to be denied because it would be improper for him to enjoy anything while still committing the crime of stupidity. What had driven Ralph to Dr. Godden was a girl friend who had made it a condition of their continued relationship. but what had driven him to the set of mind that he lived by Dr. Godden hadn’t as yet been able to learn. It was somewhere in the early years, and Ralph’s blankness on that period was itself a strong indication that Dr. Godden was on the right track.

Now, Ralph’s reply to Roger was only a sheepish grinning, “I’m always late.” Then he sat there and panted.

Dr. Godden looked at them, his assistants, and he found himself envying the man Ellen knew as Parker. When Parker made a plan he knew the parts of it would be carried out by professionals, solid reliable men who did this sort of thing for a living. Dr. Godden would have preferred to work with professionals himself, but according to Ellen these people did have loyalty among themselves and in the normal way of things wouldn’t steal from one another. Honor among thieves apparently did exist after all.

So it was Roger and Ralph. Dr. Godden had gone through the list of his patients, had sounded a few of them out very gently and obliquely, and it had come down at last to Roger and Ralph.

Roger had been easy to convince; perhaps, from the sound of last night’s dream, he’d been too easy. But if Roger had any hidden doubts or apprehensions, Dr. Godden prided himself he’d be able to contain them at least until the night’s work was over. Ralph, burly and cumbersome and self-doubting, had taken longer to persuade, but in the end his trust for Dr. Godden had swung it, and now he was committed without question.

The same basic argument had been used on both of them; it would be therapy. To Ralph: “Here’s a chance to prove you are capable after all. With this accomplishment behind you, there’s no telling how much we’ll be able to unlock, how much more of you we’ll be able to free.” And to Roger: “You’ll never find a better opportunity to express all your independence and revolt at once. Do this, act out all your aggressions and resentments in this one action, do it successfully, and you’ll be well on your way to the independence we both know you need for self-fulfillment.”

Dr. Godden’s own reasons were more mundane; he needed money. With a rapacious ex-wife bleeding him white for alimony and child support payments, with a second wife who didn’t know the meaning of the word economy, and with Mary Beth — a patient now become mistress — becoming more expensive every month, Dr. Godden had been teetering at the brink of financial chaos for over a year now. And to top it off this man Nolan had reappeared, demanding money to keep his mouth shut, threatening to open up that business in New York again, to let the local medical society know his credentials weren’t entirely in order.

Fred Godden never intended to get into trouble or to break the law, things just happened around him. Like California, where he’d started out and where the brother-in-law of a patient had gotten him involved in that abortion business. He himself had performed no abortions, he’d only served as a middleman, but when that one girl died the investigation dragged in a lot of wriggling fish, Dr. Fred Godden among them. The authorities had never quite accepted the idea that the dead girl — and three others they’d found — had all coincidentally come to him as psychiatric patients shortly before their abortions, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Still, it had seemed wisest to leave California, particularly since his first wife had chosen the blow-up as an excuse to divorce him, just as though it hadn’t been her free-spending that had driven him into the racket in the first place.

In New York he had developed a new practice and a new wife, but his taste in women seemed doomed not to change, and wife number two spent just as frantically as had wife number one, so when one of his patients came up with the drug suggestion he was ready for it.

How did they know, that’s what bothered him, how did these people always know he’d be open to their suggestions, weak enough to agree, to lend his respectable façade to their schemes. He’d studied his face in the bathroom mirror more than once, and as far as he could see he didn’t look shady. And he’d heard tape recordings of his voice; and he didn’t sound shady. So how did they know?

They knew, that’s all. As a doctor, he could get hold of drugs, especially the new chemicals, the psychedelics. As a doctor specializing in psychoanalysis, his cover was perfect for the people who needed someone to act as a source of supply and a base for distribution. And if one of the shuffling bearded oddballs who’d come to him for the yellow capsules hadn’t turned out to be a policeman, one of the New York City Police Department undercover narcotics men, he might still be there, in New York City, with the lucrative practice and the even more lucrative sideline, instead of here in this sinkhole.

He’d gotten out of it in New York, too, though he’d spent nine days in jail, in the Tombs, and had come out of it stripped of his credentials and legal permission to operate either as a doctor or an analyst. But how else could he made a living? That was why he’d moved up to this godforsaken area, where a man’s bona fides were unlikely to be very closely scrutinized, but where the number of patients — and their ability to pay — was depressingly low.

And then Nolan had showed up. One of the buyers back in New York, Nolan had known everything about Dr. Godden’s connection with the gang, and now here he was in Monequois, demanding money as the price of his silence. How Nolan had found him Dr. Godden didn’t know, any more than he had known at first where he could possibly find the money to pay him.

But hard on the heels of Nolan had come the sudden revelation from Ellen Fusco, and all at once it had seemed to Dr. Godden that there was a way out after all, that he could see daylight at the end of the tunnel.

What he would do after tonight he himself wasn’t entirely sure. Would he merely pay off Nolan and all his outstanding debts, then tuck the rest away for the next crisis? Or would he pack his bags and leave the whole mess, start again somewhere else under another name, leave wives and children and mistresses and blackmailer and all? If that was what he wanted, there’d be money enough. Ralph and Roger, not having been told the true scope of the affair, were content to be receiving ten thousand dollars each. That meant almost the whole thing for Dr. Godden, estimated by Ellen Fusco at four hundred thousand dollars.

Four hundred thousand dollars. To tackle people like Parker and Fusco and Devers and the others Ellen had told him about, to risk the precarious balance he now had, to take a chance on using these two poor incompetents, it was all worth it for four hundred thousand dollars.

He had thought about it often. He well knew the danger in seeking the Holy Grail, he’d seen it frequently enough in his patients. “If only X happens, everything will be all right.” The belief in the easy one-shot panacea more frequently led to disaster than salvation.

So he couldn’t allow himself to think of it in all-encompassing terms. Even with the four hundred thousand in his hands, he would still be Fred Godden, Dr. Fred Godden, with a shady past and a penny-ante practice, with a wife and an ex-wife and a mistress and a certain bleak awareness of his own tendency toward erratic behavior when it came to women, and with a history of bad errors of judgment leading him into trouble. Nothing would change after tonight except his financial status. He would be wealthy, but he would still be the same man.

Knowing that, being sure not to forget it, he had studied the proposition, the possibilities, the dangers, the rewards, and at last he had made up his mind. An opportunity like this wouldn’t be coming his way twice. He’d be a fool to let this one slip by.

Tonight.

Dr. Godden looked at Roger and Ralph. His mob. They would have to do.

He took a deep breath, “I taped Mrs Fusco’s session just now,” he said. “She’s given us their plans from beginning to end. We’ll listen to them first, and then go over our own plans once more.”

Ralph and Roger looked alert, Dr. Godden pressed the switch and the voice of Ellen Fusco, faintly metallic, began once more to drone.