The Specialists

Sixteen

“Her name was Florence Mannheim, but she cut it to Mann when I was still in diapers. That was the same time that we moved out to Astoria.”

“From where?”

“East New York. When she told me all this, when I started to check things out, I found out we lived on Pitkin Avenue. I went over and looked at the building. Nobody lives there now. All the windows broken, the door kicked in.”

“Pitkin Avenue,” Platt said.

“She always told me my father was dead. He died in the war, she said. Before I was born. She said his name was Edward like mine and he was in the Air Force and his plane was shot down over Germany. I checked that, too, and there was no record he ever existed. And Mannheim was her maiden name. She was never married, at least not in New York. There’s no record of it anywhere. So I don’t know if you’re my father or not, but whoever it was, he wasn’t married to my mother.”

“Florence Mannheim,” Platt said. He was no longer holding the gun. “This is crazy. I never had a son.”

“She said she never told you about me.”

“I never heard of a Florence Mannheim.”

“She said you probably wouldn’t even remember her. It was hard for me to follow her. She was dying. I was just back from the service and she was dying and she said she had to tell me something, and I said to just take it easy, just rest, and she sat up and started telling me that there was no Edward Mannheim and that my father was a man named Albert Platt. She said she went out on the Island and had me at a nursing home and the birth was never registered. I’ve never been able to get hold of my birth certificate. When I was sixteen, I had trouble getting a driver’s license. I had to go to the school for proof of age.”

Platt’s eyes were half-lidded, his brow ridged. “You’re how old?”

“Twenty-eight in February.”

“So that’s when? Forty-one?”

“Right. I would have been conceived in nineteen forty, say late May or early June.”

“I’m trying to place this. A son. I never thought about kids, and then by the time I wanted one... I remember I picked up some kind of crazy dose. There was this Spanish kid infected half of Brooklyn. What we didn’t do to her afterwards, Christ you can bet she never clapped anybody else.” Platt laughed, then was suddenly sober again. “Couple of years ago I went to a doctor. Specialist. He said that could have been what did it, that I can’t have kids now. When the hell was that? I guess forty-two or three.”

Thank God for that, Manso thought.

“May or June of nineteen forty. This is crazy, you’re either a wise-ass punk or you’re my kid, I don’t know which. This is hard to get used to. Those years I was a nutty kid myself practically. Nineteen forty. I was what? Jesus, I was nineteen.”

“My mother was seventeen.”

“Nineteen years old. Those days I would screw anything.” Platt smiled at the memory. “We were wild kids. They used to say I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head. What was it she told you? We had a thing going or what?”

“She said just once.”

“One time?” Platt snorted. “How’s she so sure I was the hero?”

“You were the only one. She said you forced her.”

“You mean raped her?”

“She didn’t exactly say.”

“Yeah.” Platt nodded slowly. “There were so many of them in those days. You’d pick up a girl and feed her a little booze and never see her again. Half the time you never knew their last names. Florence, there were lots of girls with that name where I lived. Only generally they were called Flo. Now it’s not such a common name. What did she die of?”

“Cancer.”

“That’s a bitch, all right. Flo Mannheim? I can’t make any connections. What did she look like? What color hair?”

“Sort of a light brown.”

“And yours is dark. And the same as mine, isn’t it? I’m a son of a bitch if this isn’t the damnedest thing ever. I mean it’s crazy.”

Manso nodded “It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since she told me. Either I have a father or I don’t, and I can’t prove it one way or the other. That’s why I was sort of following you around.”

“Checking on me?”

“Right. I nosed around here a little and then when I found out you were in Vegas, I flew out there and had a closer look. I stayed at the same place. I was right next to you at the crap table one night.”

“You gamble much?”

“Some.”

“How’d you do?”

“I won a little.”

“Me, I took a bath. But what the hell, it’s a vacation, you don’t care. I got to sit down and think about this. You hungry? You want a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee would be fine.”

“Come on. Eddie is what they call you, huh? Eddie Platt. You know, you’re a good-looking kid, and the way you handled that punk. Style. That’s one thing I always had even as a kid, I had style. Who taught you to handle yourself like that? You learn it in the service?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, come on inside, we’ll sit and have coffee.”

Giordano sat in his car reading the resort and travel section of the Sunday Times. The newsstand got all the back sections a day early, and the newsie had told him he could stop in the following morning for the news sections. Giordano didn’t think he would bother.

He was reading an article on new travel opportunities in Bulgaria. None of his customers had ever wanted to go to Bulgaria. It was not very likely, he thought, that any of them ever would. Giordano wanted to go there, though. Giordano wanted to go anyplace he’d never been.

He looked up, realizing he’d read the same paragraph three times over and had retained none of it. He propped the paper against the steering wheel and leaned back. His car was parked at a shopping plaza a mile and three-quarters from the Platt estate. The homing device that Simmons had attached to Platt’s Lincoln had an effective range of five miles, and the receiver on the seat next to Giordano was turned all the way up. But there was no sound coming out of it.

The beeper was the type used by police to pinpoint the location of a moving car. In order to do that effectively, you had to have three receiving units in operation, using three cars in radio contact to triangulate on the car under surveillance. They only had one receiver, but it was really all they needed. Simmons had planted the homing device with the switch turned off. When Manso turned it on, that meant he was planted and all systems were go.

If he didn’t turn it on—

A muscle worked in Giordano’s cheek. It was almost five now. Manso had gone inside at three. About that time Giordano took up his post at the shopping plaza, and a little later Simmons and Murdock had shown up to pass on the film cartridges and let him know the beeper was in place. All Giordano could do was wait.

He glared at the receiver. When it beeped, he had to scoot out to Tarrytown to develop Murdock’s films and have a look at Dehn’s sketches, and it would have to be a quick look at that because he had a date with Patricia at 8:30, and while he didn’t expect to be on time, he didn’t want to keep her waiting too long. The more time he spent at the shopping plaza, the closer he would have to cut things, which was aggravating. Worse, the more time passed without a signal from Manso, the more chance there was that there wouldn’t ever be a signal from Manso.

Suppose, he thought, somebody took the car out. Five miles wasn’t all that far. All Platt had to do was send somebody out for groceries and he’d be hung up waiting for a signal that couldn’t come. Of course if the car was gone — that didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. It could mean, for example, that Eddie was doubled up in the trunk and they were taking him for a ride to the swamp.

But looking was better than sitting still. Giordano turned the key in the ignition and headed the car toward Platt’s home. He had been past the estate several times already and had no trouble finding it. The entrance of the garage was dark and he had time for only a quick look, so he couldn’t say that he actually saw a Lincoln there. But there were three cars in the garage and that was all the cars Platt had, so it figured that one of them was the Lincoln.

More important, Eddie’s car was parked in the driveway.

He went back to the lot. The receiver remained silent. Giordano tried to decide whether Eddie’s car was a good sign or a bad one. He thought it over and came to the conclusion that it was about as significant as the presence of the Lincoln in the garage. It didn’t mean anything much one way or the other. The only question, the question that couldn’t be answered except by the receiving unit, was whether or not Platt would buy Eddie’s story. If he bought it, if he bought just a piece of it, they were still a long way from home. But if he turned it down, Eddie was behind enemy lines with no bullets in his gun and his ass in a sling.

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.