The Specialists

Five

When Giordano opened his travel agency in Phoenix, a few of his friends told him he ought to change his name. “Because face it, Lou,” one of them said, “there’s this image people have of Italians. Me, I’m in construction, an Italian builder is something the average Joe can understand. But who’s gonna do business with a travel agent named Giordano?”

“Anybody who wants to go to Rome,” Giordano said.

Not many people did, as it happened. Giordano’s Travel Bureau occupied three magnificently appointed rooms in the best office building in downtown Phoenix, and Giordano himself occupied a penthouse at the Wentworth Arms, and everyone knew he had to be grossing better than fifty thousand a year. Everybody was wrong. The travel agency had everything but customers, largely because Giordano spent so much of his time traveling on his own and so little time handling business. He made enough to cover the salaries of the two girls who worked for him. His books — the ones he consulted when he filed his tax return — showed a net profit for the past year of twenty-one thousand dollars. The real books showed a slight loss, but not enough of one to get concerned about.

Giordano was 31, toothpick thin, with straight brown hair and angular features. He went into the Army looking like the 97-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas ads, and he enlisted in the hope that the service would build him up. He did put on a few pounds at first, and the little flesh he carried on his frame turned almost at once to muscle, but he never did stop looking undernourished. By the time he came home from Laos, a bad dose of malaria had him looking as bad as he did when he enlisted, and a hell of a lot older. On top of everything else, somewhere in the course of things his eyesight deteriorated, so now he was not only a shrimp but a shrimp who wore glasses.

He fooled people. Thin frame, thin legs, wrists like a schoolgirl, thick glasses, he fooled people all the time. When the colonel got them all together in Philadelphia for Operation Sharkbait, he planted himself as an invalid accountant with a ton of hospital bills. He got into the loan shark for a couple of thousand, not because the money mattered — the big score was almost forty times that figure — but in order to get a closer look at the loan shark’s operation.

The timing got slightly screwed up on that operation. The shark sent a couple of muscle boys after Giordano before the squad was ready to pull the chain, and Giordano came home one day to find a pair of heavies waiting in his room. He played his part as long as he could, whining and begging and promising to pay, but scaring wasn’t enough. They had orders to rough him up a little. His better judgment told him to take the beating, that they were pros and wouldn’t overdo it, but when they reached for him, his reflexes took over. He flipped one of the goons off a wall and chopped the other one in the Adam’s apple. Then he stood looking down at them and cursed himself quietly for jeopardizing the whole score. If they went back to their boss with the news that the sick, puny accountant was a tiger in disguise, things could suddenly get very sticky.

So he gave them each an extra chop in the neck. After he had made sure that they were both properly dead, he made a phone call, and Murdock and Frank Dehn drove over in a truck and carried the two hoods out in a pair of steamer trunks. They shipped them both express collect to Seattle. Giordano checked the papers for weeks afterward and never saw a line about it

Giordano fooled women, too. They started off feeling sorry for him, certain they would be safe with him. The outcome surprised them as much as it surprised the two hoods in Philadelphia, although the women rarely felt bad about it. He used a sort of mental karate, pitching the charm at just the right level until they felt that they could perform the kindest and most charitable act of their lives by going to bed with him. The next thing they knew they were hysterical with passion. By morning they would be madly in love with Giordano, who would never see them again. It wasn’t a matter of principle with him. He had told friends that he was spending his entire life looking for a woman he would want to see a second time, and he just hadn’t found her yet.

Nor did he intend to abandon the search. On Tuesday night his telephone rang while he was searching industriously with a six-foot Swedish blonde whose breasts each weighed about as much as Giordano. The phone picked a very bad time to ring, and Giordano flipped the receiver onto the floor and went back to what he was doing. He never did get around to putting it back on the hook, so he didn’t get the colonel’s wire until he went to the office the next morning.

“Get me on an afternoon flight to Kennedy,” he told one of his girls. “Round-trip, return open. Call United first, but check the movie for me before you make it firm. Then call the Plaza in New York or, if they’re full, the Pierre. Tell them just overnight.”

He didn’t have to worry about packing. He had a bag packed and ready in his office. There were two suits in it, plus shirts and socks and underwear and a full complement of toilet articles. There was also a pair of throwing knives, a strip of very thin, very strong steel, and a small-caliber automatic pistol.

The girl looked up from the phone. “Oh, Lou,” she said, “was that first-class or tourist? I don’t think you said.”

“Oh, make it first-class,” he told her. “They give us a discount.”