The Specialists

Three

Simmons was mowing the front lawn when the telegram came. He liked to keep the grass just about an inch and a half high, so he had adjusted the blades to that height and mowed the whole lawn, front and back, every Tuesday and Friday evening before dinner. He could have done this at any time of the day, since he worked at home and set his own hours, but he liked to be out there walking behind that big rotary mower when the neighbors drove home from work. Other garden work and home repairs he did when the occasion arose. It was very important, though, that his neighbors could watch him cut that damn grass.

“Howard! Howard!” He cut the mower’s engine, walked over to the front door. Esther was framed in the doorway, the light of the setting sun glinting off the lenses of her glasses.

“A telegram,” she said.

“Oh, dear Lord,” he said.

“I had them read it out to me over the phone.”

“Tell me.”

“It used to be that they always delivered telegrams in person. Now all it is is a message over the telephone.”

He would have liked to shout at her, but this was something he had never done since the day they met. Three years, one child and another coming, and he had never once shouted at her. But it was so maddening the way she fed information in bite-sized pieces, and with the reflected sunlight obscuring her eyes he couldn’t read her face.

He approached her, took her arm. “Bad news?”

“Well, no. But bad for me. I wrote it down.” She turned and he followed her into the house. “Another collection coming on the market, so I suppose that’s another business trip. Here.”

The message read: OPPORTUNITY NEGOTIATE PURCHASE HIGH TICKET EUROPEAN COLLECTION STRONG NINETEENTH CENTURY CLASSICS RECOMMEND THURSDAY ARRIVAL. It was signed ROGER CROSS.

“I suppose you’re going?”

“If you like food on the table, then I’m going.”

“I like food on the table. I like my husband home, too. Where is it you’re going?”

“Cross is in New York,” he said. “I’ll have to meet him there, but most likely the collection will be somewhere halfway across the country, and I’ll be chasing after it.”

“Why aren’t there ever any collections here in Detroit? You’d think there wasn’t a stamp collector in the entire state of Michigan, but I just suppose when they think on selling they call in some dealer from Arizona or New Mexico. Didn’t this Roger Cross send you a telegram before?”

He nodded. “Sort of a vest-pocket dealer. He’ll run into things like this that aren’t in his line, you see, and if I make a deal I’ll pay him a commission.”

“I just hope you won’t be gone long as last time. Two months and you’re going to be a daddy again, you know. Be nice if you were around for it.”

He came up behind her, put his arms around her, clasped his hands over her abdomen. “Nice little baby,” he said.

“Oh, now.”

His hands moved upward to her large breasts. “Lucky baby. What nice lunch bags, I declare.”

She giggled, delighted, then shook herself free. “How you carry on, Howard Simmons. Now I’ve got dinner to fix, and you have a lawn to mow. You don’t want them saying you don’t keep up your property, do you?”

“And aren’t those my property, Queen Esther?”

“Go on, now,” she said.

After dinner he called Northwest Orient and made a reservation for Wednesday night. He bathed little Martin and played with him until bedtime, then sat with Esther in front of the color television set. He couldn’t keep his mind on the programs, and after a while he didn’t even try. He thought about the telegram from the colonel and wondered what it would turn out to be.

He found himself wondering if the men liked him. The colonel did, he knew, but sometimes he felt a little ill at ease with the other men, as if his presence made them indefinably uncomfortable. He knew he was inclined to be overly sensitive, it was the way he was, and of course you couldn’t get away from the class division even in civilian life. He had been an officer, a captain, and they were enlisted men, and that in its own way created a gulf at least as great as the other element that separated him from them.

The first time, in Canada, he had been particularly aware of the distance between himself and Dehn and Giordano and Murdock and Manso. More with Murdock than the others, perhaps, but it was there with all of them. Still, he had to admit that it had never gotten in the way. The five of them worked together on an equal level, planned the operation and carried it through, and when they were all together with the colonel in the big house in Tarrytown, the pie was carved into equal shares, a shade over fifty thousand in cash money for each of them.

“I want to thank you all,” the colonel had said. “You’ll all go back to your own separate lives now. I don’t suppose we’ll see each other much, if at all. But if any of you ever needs anything, anything at all—”

Then a sort of embarrassed pause, until Giordano said what all of them had been thinking. “Sir, I’ll say one thing. This past month makes the first time I’ve felt like myself since I took off that uniform, sir.”

Nods and echoes. And Ben Murdock, elaborately casual, saying, “You know, this kind of thing, we could do it again sometime.”

The six of them were up all night talking about it. All over the country there were dirty men with dirty money, men the law could never get close to, but once you took their money away, it turned clean. Hard, tough men — but after fun and games in Laos you weren’t so easily impressed by tough men in civvies. As the colonel said, it was all the same jungle, and jungle fighting was what they were trained for.

The colonel helped plan out their lives for them. They needed covers, he told them. They needed lives that would account for their income, needed ways to bury their money and turn dirty money into clean money.

For Simmons, the answer was a simple one. All his life, ever since his second-grade teacher gave him some stamps from letters from her mother in Hungary, he had spent spare time working on his stamp collection. It wasn’t much of a collection because he had never earned huge money, but it was perfectly organized and beautifully mounted. And ever since he decided against reenlisting and went back to Detroit and found Esther and married her, ever since then he’d had that one big dream. Sooner or later, damn it, he was going to be a stamp dealer.

An independent dealer. No shop, no boss, no customers to meet face to face, even. Ads in the magazines and all his business done by mail, and Lord, if he only had the capital, he could do it right. None of the penny-ante stuff, no fooling with new issues and other promotional items. Just buying and selling good solid collectible stamps.

It was the perfect cover. The fifty thousand from Operation Stockpile was enough to buy the house and the stamp stock and keep the business running a long time. As it turned out, the business went into the black by the fourth month; last year he had netted better than twelve thousand dollars just selling stamps. And the two operations they had carried out since then were gravy. It was a cinch to hide the proceeds, paying cash for expensive stamps for his own collection. His personal collection was quite an improvement on that handful of Hungarian stamps that started him off twenty-seven years ago. He wondered what Esther would say if she knew how much it was worth.

And later, in bed, after he had successfully convinced her that lovemaking would not constitute an invasion of the baby-to-be’s privacy, he listened to her measured breathing and wished he didn’t have to keep this part of his life secret from her. It was for her own good, he knew. She worried enough if he got on a plane, and if she had the slightest idea what he really did on those business trips, it would tear her up, no question about it.

Still, though, there were times when he ached to tell her, if only for the fun of checking out her reaction. He decided that she just wouldn’t believe it, any more than his mail-order stamp customers would believe that Howard Simmons was a Negro.