The Specialists

One

Manso was shaving when someone started pounding on the door. He had a towel around his middle and a face half full of lather. He called out, “Yeah, just a minute,” and brought the razor into position for another stroke.

The pounding didn’t stop, and over it he heard Donna’s voice. He was about to tell her to wait, but something in her tone changed his mind. He went to the door, still carrying the razor, still wearing the towel and the lather.

“I was just shaving,” he told her. “I didn’t expect... what’s the matter?”

He had never seen her like this, face pale and drawn, eyes crazed, desperate. He started to say something, stopped himself, turned to lock the door. When he turned around again, she was climbing out of her dress.

He said, “Baby, I don’t—” and her eyes flashed at him.

“Don’t ever call me baby.”

“Huh?”

She was suddenly gasping for breath. He stared at her. He had been in Vegas for three weeks and sleeping with her for two and he had never seen her like this. She wasn’t a girl who got like this. She was bright eyes and laughter at the shows and cool reserve at the dice tables and friendly clean fire in bed. She was never hysteria; it didn’t fit.

She said, “I took a shower, I used a mouthwash. I can’t get clean. I took a shower so hot it burned. Eddie, please. I can’t talk, I just can’t. The shower was hot but I’m cold cold cold and I have to be warm and I have to be clean.”

He waited.

“Bed, please. Take me to bed. Could you do that? Could you just take me to bed? Could you?”

Afterward he lit cigarettes and called down for ice. He made drinks and took them into the bedroom. She went through hers in a hurry and he built her a second.

She said, “I never exactly told you this, but I’m sort of like a hooker.”

“I guessed.”

“How? I come on cheap?”

“No amateur could be so skilled.”

“I’m serious. How?”

“Well, two and two. Vegas, and this place, and no job or husband. And you said a dancer, and your legs, your muscles are different from a dancer’s.”

“I didn’t think you knew because you never let on. It didn’t bother you?”

“Sure it did. It made me impotent.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry, and maybe I need jokes. But didn’t you feel anything?”

“Maybe flattered. To be on the free list. You want to tell me about it, Donna?”

“Huh?”

“Because you didn’t just wake up tonight and remember the nuns telling you that bad girls go to hell when they die. If you don’t want to talk about it, fine, but I get the feeling you do.”

“Go to hell. Oh, I didn’t mean you, that you should, I was just being an echo. What you said. Dying and going to hell. Did you ever almost die?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever have somebody point a gun at you and think you were going to die?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? What happened?”

He very nearly said, I got killed, but it wasn’t the time. “It was in the Army, there were lots of times, but either I shot first or something got me out of it.”

“They said he was a banker. Very important, a banker, but he didn’t talk like one or act like one. God knows a banker can be as kinky as anybody else, but he was a banker like I’m a boy. He was—”

“Start over.”

“What I thought first was he must be like a numbers banker. Or a bookmaker, you know, a major bookmaker that they might call him a banker so he’s not just another bookie.”

“Start over.”

She turned to him. Her eyes worked into focus. “I’m all right now,” she told him.

“I know. Want to start over?”

“Okay.”

He didn’t interrupt. The hysteria had passed and she was able to tell it straight enough now, and he let her do it her way and just lay there on the double bed nursing his drink and taking it all in. The colonel was right, he found himself thinking. You had to draw a line through mankind, a wavy line but a line, and on one side you had Good and on the other side you had Evil. There was good and bad in everyone, sure, and every shitheel was some mother’s son, and it was all well and good to know this, but when push came to shove, it was just words; there was Good and Evil with no shades of gray and Judgment Day came seven times a week.

When she ran out of words, Manso stood up. “Stay right here,” he said. “You know where the liquor is. Stay here.”

“Eddie, he’s got a gun. He’ll kill you!”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “This is going to kill the image, but all I’m going to do is finish shaving. Because I want to finish shaving, and because I need a few minutes to think about this. Just stay here.”

He ran water, spread fresh lather. He was 28, and the face in the mirror looked a little older. This was unusual; for the past three years he had looked 23 almost all the time. But every once in a while his face put on five years. Generally it was heart-shaped and cherubic, topped by a cap of black curls and dimpled on either side of his mouth. Now the planes of his face were harder, and the eyes had turned, and the general impression was no longer one of a moderator of a daytime television show.

He took his time shaving, rinsed, splashed with cold water and after-shave lotion. He thought about beating Platt up, even killing him. Of course there was always the chance that Donna was building fantasies in her head. He could have told her in advance that it was just an act he went through with hookers, say, and Donna later got carried away with the realism of the whole thing.

But what he kept coming back to was this business of Platt insisting he was a banker. A hood who owns banks?

He went back to the bedroom. She was nursing a new drink and smoking another cigarette. “What bank?”

“Huh?”

“Platt. What’s his bank? You said he was talking about it.”

“He was a hood, Eddie. Believe me. You live in Vegas and you get to know what a hood is.”

“Yeah.”

“There are hoods you’ll meet who talk like bankers, but I never met a banker who—”

“Yeah. Did he mention the bank?”

“I think so. He said he had three of them.”

“Three banks?”

“No, I guess it was two.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t one?”

“No, I’m positive it was two. And he said New Jersey, I remember that much.”

“You remember the city?”

“Two cities, one for each bank.”

“You remember them?” She didn’t. “Hackensack, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton? Camden, uh, New Brunswick, East Orange, uh, Plainfield—”

“I think I’d remember if I heard. Is it important?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know. You’d remember if you heard. Jesus, I think I just named every town there is in Jersey. Princeton? Secaucus?”

“No.” She thought for a moment. “One of them had Commerce in its name.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I guess it doesn’t. You’re not... you act as though I ought to remember.”

“Sorry.”

“He was the same way. The one with Commerce, that was the one he thought I ought to recognize. He asked me what the hell was wrong with me, didn’t I ever listen to a radio? I said yes and he said maybe it wasn’t on yet. I don’t—”

Eddie was out of bed and on his way to the television set. They watched the last reel of the late show and caught fifteen minutes of news. Nothing. What the hell was Platt talking about?

He fed her drinks until the sun came up, then tucked her in and went downstairs to the casino. There was one crap table open, with three shills trying to feign interest in it. He joined them and felt at least as bored as they were. After half an hour he cashed out a few dollars ahead and had breakfast.

When the New York papers came, he went to work on them. The story was on the first page of the second section of the Times. The afternoon before, five masked bandits winged a teller and shot a guard dead and took the Passaic (N.J.) Bank of Commerce and Industry for a sum estimated at slightly in excess of $350,000.

Manso read the brief story twice through, cut it out, read it again, carried it to a phone booth.

“I want to call Tarrytown, New York,” he told the operator. “Person-to-person to Colonel Roger Cross.” He reached into his pocket, came up with a few quarters and a nickel. “And reverse the charges,” he said.

She asked his name and number. “Eddie Manso,” he said, and gave the number, which she read back to him. “Make that Corporal Manso,” he added. “Corporal Edward J. Manso.”