The Specialists (3 page)

“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.

FOUR

It was clear hot weather in Joplin, so Dehn took the day off. He generally took off three or four days a week, not counting Saturdays and Sundays. If the weather was good, he liked to spend his time on a golf course. If it wasn’t, he sure as hell didn’t want to go around ringing doorbells. But once or twice a week the weather would be sufficiently unremarkable as to make golf unappealing and doorbell-ringing bearable, and on those days he would walk the streets of whatever city he happened to be in and try to sell some poor clown an encyclopedia.

He was pretty good at it because he got such a kick out of people. He traveled for a good encyclopedia, one of the two or three best, and he didn’t feel at all dishonest about conning people into buying it. When you came right down to it, nobody really needed an encyclopedia. A staggering number of people lived full and rewarding lives without ever being in the same house with an encyclopedia. On the other hand, though, if a guy was going to waste his money on something, he could do a lot worse. It certainly didn’t hurt you to have an encyclopedia in the house. It wasn’t like selling liquor or cigarettes or automobiles. Nobody ever got killed by an encyclopedia.

Because he got a kick out of people, and because he regarded both his work and his customers with the ideal mixture of sincerity and contempt, Dehn was a pretty decent salesman. He averaged close to a sale a week, and with his net on a sale pegged at $168.50 he earned not too much less money than he spent. He had figured that he ought to pay taxes on around ten thou a year. He made up the difference now and then by sending in an order and paying for it himself, generally with a money order drawn under a fictitious name. He had the sets delivered to orphanages and old folks’ homes as anonymous gifts, with the commissions that came back to him from the Chicago office boosting his income to a sufficiently realistic figure.

That day he got out to the golf course early. He hung around the clubhouse until three other loners accumulated, then played eighteen holes with them as a foursome. He hooked most of his tee shots, but his short game was on and he came in with an 82, which was a little better than he averaged on that course.

The weather was just as good that afternoon. He was going to play around again after lunch but changed his mind and put his clubs in the trunk. He drove out Grand Avenue into one of the newer developments and went around punching doorbells. The first fifteen houses he didn’t even get a foot in the door. The sixteenth was a bottle-blonde housewife with her kids in school and her husband at the plant, and after two and a half hours in her bedroom he could have sold her six encyclopedias and a second-hand Edsel, but he didn’t even try. He had done that once and it made him feel too much like a pimp.

He drove back to his motel and read
Hydroz
to
Jerem
until it was time to go out for dinner. He ate downtown, caught a movie, stopped at a drugstore for an ice cream soda, and got back to the motel around nine thirty. The telegram was waiting at the desk for him.

Dehn generally worked a new town for three or four weeks, and whenever he moved, he sent the colonel his address. He had mailed a great many postcards to Tarrytown since the last operation. Now, as the clerk passed him the telegram, his heart pounded faster. In his room he read:
REGRET TO INFORM YOU AUNT HARRIET DIED PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP LAST NIGHT FUNERAL THURSDAY. ROGER
.

He left the telegram on the nightstand. It took him twenty minutes to pack his suitcases and settle his bill. Another ten minutes and he was on 66 heading east. “Poor Aunt Hattie,” he said. “I wonder if she mentioned me in her will.”

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.”