The Specialists (18 page)

“How did you know? Oh, that’s right, I made this speech before, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“You look good as a blonde.”

“I’ll have to get to a beauty parlor. The roots are starting to show.”

“I didn’t notice. The blonde hair and the tan—I don’t think your own mother would recognize you.”

“Well, we can’t test that out, can we?”

“No, I’m afraid we can’t.” He started to say something else, then changed direction. “I called the airport. I booked us on a Trans-Carib flight Thursday to Miami. Then from there we fly Delta. We could have had a through flight Wednesday on Pan Am, but the Trans-Carib’s a better line. And this way we have an extra day.”

“I’m glad of that. Will I like Phoenix?”

“I like it. And you can keep the tan year-round out there.”

“Will you . . . still want me in Phoenix?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, I figured there were other girls there.”

“Nothing serious.”

“Because you and I have no strings. I’m alive, that’s enough. If you see something you want——”

“We’ll just keep on keeping on, huh?”

“Because what you said—nothing’s forever.”

Later: “I wonder where they all are, what they’re doing.”

“The colonel’s reading something. His Bible or some military history. Helen’s probably baking. The others? Howard was going to spend a couple of days in New York. There were some stamp auctions he wanted to go to. Frank is on the road somewhere, I don’t know where. Ben’s probably in the drunk tank of some jail or other. He generally goes on a bender afterwards and drinks up all his money.”

“How can anybody drink up fifty thousand dollars?”

“Ben would try, but he doesn’t have to. If he took all his cash he’d get himself in all kinds of trouble. He generally takes a thousand or two. He keeps five hundred bucks for getaway money and blows the rest. What he doesn’t take, the colonel invests for him. Ben must be worth, oh, a quarter of a million.”

“You would never guess it.”

“He doesn’t act it. He doesn’t even think about it, which is why he manages to stay out of trouble. You see, that’s the whole thing, you have to create a life for yourself that you feel comfortable in. Like we could spend absolutely all our time traveling and living it up, but then life would just be something in between the jobs, and it’s harder to live that way. Same with Ben. When he runs out of dough, he’ll get a job somewhere. And live like a bum until the colonel gives him a call.”

“And Eddie? He’s in Europe?”

He nodded. “Monte Carlo, I think. He wants to stay away from the stateside gambling areas, at least for the time being. He’s clean as far as the police are concerned, but he figures it might be good to let the gambling types have some time to forget about Platt and his wife. You want to go in for a minute before we go back to the cabin?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll just take a dip, then. It seems to be doing my leg some good.”

She sat on the beach and watched him bobbing in the waves. She lit a cigarette, then poked the burnt match into the sand.

She would not see her children again, or her parents. Perhaps not ever, and certainly not for many years.

She thought that there must be something wrong with her. Because she had loved the children, and she had cared for her mother and father, and now she was never going to see them again and she didn’t seem to care at all. It seemed unnatural, and she thought that there must be something wrong with her.

She was tan, she was blonde, she glowed with health and vitality. She was eating like a horse and still losing weight, slimming down nicely. And her face, when she caught sight of it in a mirror, looked back at her radiant with the joy of being alive and in love.

He didn’t want to get married. Well, neither did she, because he was right and nothing was forever. Sooner or later he would probably want to be rid of her. He denied this now, but she expected it would happen sooner or later. But by then she would be trained in a new life role, and she wouldn’t go back to New Jersey and the police would never find her.

According to the papers, she was presumed dead. A hostage, kidnapped and presumed dead. Well, she thought, so be it. Patricia Novak, rest in peace. Patricia Crosby, welcome to the club.

Giordano was emerging from the surf. He walked easily, hardly favoring the leg at all. She looked at him in the moonlight and her blood quickened, and she ran across the sand to meet him.

THE END

A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

My novel
The Specialists
was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal Books. Some years later, James Cahill published a first hardcover edition of the book and requested that I furnish an introduction. Here’s what I found to say about the book:

I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m most often identified as the creator of series characters. My two active series, concerning a bookselling burglar named Rhodenbarr and a sober drunk named Scudder, are the ones people are most likely to know about. Readers with a wider range may be familiar as well with a series of seven novels about an insomniac named Tanner, and another series of four novels about a horny kid named Harrison.

A relative handful will have followed the adventures in short-story form of two other gents, an attorney called Ehrengraf and a killer named Keller. But that’s about as far as it goes. Hardly anybody, asked to name all of my series, would come up with
The Specialists.

A fat lot they know. As far as I’m concerned,
The Specialists
is unequivocally a series novel. As it happens, the series is only one book long. But I figure it’s a series just the same.

What on earth is he talking about, Maude?

Easy, there. I can explain.

In the spring of 1966 I moved into a big old house on a small old lot smack in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey. I set up an office for myself on the third floor. I had a massive old desk, and the movers couldn’t get the thing up the last flight of stairs. It wouldn’t fit. Most desks of that vintage disassemble, but not this sucker. They had to cut the back legs off it. I propped up the back of the desk with two short stacks of paperback novels, plopped a typewriter on top of it, and went to work.

Three and a half years later, when we moved to a place in the country, I left the desk right there, and I left the books to keep it from tilting. By that time the desk didn’t owe me a dime, because I’d sat at it and written a whole slew of books. I’d already written the first Tanner book in Racine, Wisconsin, but I wrote the other six in New Brunswick, along with
After the First Death
and
Such Men Are Dangerous
and more pseudonymous work than I’ll admit to at the moment. (I wrote
No Score
, the first Chip Harrison novel, in that house but not on that desk. I moved downstairs to the first floor and wrote it on the breakfast-room table. I can’t remember why.)

I also wrote
The Specialists
at that desk. My then-agent (and still-friend) Henry Morrison suggested I might try to come up with a series, and he liked the idea of a group of guys working together in the tried-and-true manner of
The League of Gentlemen.
I hadn’t read the book in question, but I got the idea. I wrote a couple of chapters and an outline and pitched the idea as a series to an editor at (I think) Dell Publishing. Whoever she was and wherever she was, she thought the outline sounded good, and I went home to my desk to finish the first book.

And I did, and you in turn have read it . . . unless you’re one of those people who read the afterword first and then read the book. If you’re of a more conventional temperament, you may have noticed how very much a part of a series it is. I did all the series things, did them with considerable calculation. I dropped in tantalizing little references to past adventures, figuring we’d hear more about them later on. I gave the characters back stories I could build on and play off of in future books. I did all kinds of things along those lines because it was quite clear to me that I wasn’t writing a novel, I was writing the first installment of a series. My deal with Dell (or whoever it was), when we finalized it, would be for three books, and who knew how many I’d wind up writing? My guys could go on having adventures until their gruff old colonel grew himself a new leg. Hell, I could write about these bozos forever!

Yeah, right.

I finished the book without a problem, and Henry liked it, and he sent it over to Dell. (I
think
it was Dell.) While I’d been breezing along on the book, the editor who’d liked the idea had gone somewhere else, and her replacement didn’t like the idea—or the book, either. Henry took it back and sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal Books, who had published a number of books of mine, and who liked it just fine. I signed a contract and then I got a call from Henry.

“Knox was wondering,” he said, “if
The Specialists
is the first volume of a series. Shall I tell him yes, and that you’re already hard at work on the next installment?”

“God, no,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Tell him it’s complete in and of itself,” I said.

“But I thought—”

“So did I,” I said, “and it turns out we were both wrong. Because I like the book and I sort of enjoyed writing it, but when I finished it I realized something. I don’t want to write about those guys again, ever. I liked them as characters, and it’s the kind of book I like to read, but it turns out it’s not the kind of book I like to write.”

There was a pause. Then Henry said, “That’s really strange.”

“I know it is.”

“I was sure it was going to turn out to be a series.”

“So was I, and we were right. It’s a series. But it’s a very short series.”

“Just one book long.”

“Just one book long,” I agreed. “But a series nonetheless.”

And that’s what it is. I hope you enjoyed it. I like it, I must admit, and I’m happy to see it in print in such a handsome edition. I’m glad you’ve got it on your shelf, and I’m happy to have it on my shelf.

And who knows? Maybe someday I will want to write about those guys again . . .

Well now. Jim Cahill’s edition has long since gone out of print, and I still haven’t written further about the Colonel and his merry band. But
The Specialists
is available again, now as an ebook, and I’m not half chuffed to see my one-book series find a new cyberaudience for itself.

Hmmm. You know, maybe I should write more about the lads . . .

—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in
Manhunt
, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including
American Heritage
,
Redbook
,
Playboy
,
Cosmopolitan
,
GQ
, and the
New York Times
. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including
Enough Rope
(2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in
No Score
,
Chip Harrison Scores Again
,
Make Out with Murder
, and
The Topless Tulip Caper
. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.