And now Sternberg was upstate, at Tooler’s cottages, with the letter. Parker and Wycza and Noelle and Carlow all read it, and all agreed it sounded like a politician/lawyer starting to reposition himself from off that limb he’d climbed out on.
Giving the letter back, Parker said to Sternberg, “So you’ll meet up with him on Tuesday”
“We already got an appointment,” Sternberg said. “We’re both gonna be in court that day, him in state civil, me in housing, and we’re gonna meet at the bar at five o’clock, have a drink before we go home to the trouble and strife, share our woes with the judges. That’s when I slip him the mickey.”
“What I want is him sick,” Parker said. “Through Saturday. Sick enough so he doesn’t go to any office, make any phone calls, put in any appearances anywhere. But not so sick he gets into the newspapers. Assemblyman down with Legionnaires’ disease; I don’t need that.”
“I’ll put him down,” Sternberg said, grinning, “as gentle as a soft-boiled egg.”
The letter was dated Monday, May 12th, but wouldn’t actually be mailed, in Brooklyn, until Friday the 16th, so it wouldn’t get to Commissioner Hamilton’s office until Monday the 19th at the earliest, four days before the tour of inspection. The Post Office would be blamed for the delay, and no one would think any more about it.
Kotkind’s Brooklyn constituent office was a storefront open only on Mondays and Thursdays. Carlow and Sternberg had already invaded it twice without leaving traces, and knew how the office worked. Noelle would go to Brooklyn with them on Wednesday, and from the constituent office she’d phone Commissioner Hamilton to work out the details of Assemblyman Kotkind’s visit, and she’d be happy to stick around a while so they could call her back, if for any reason they had to.
Parker said to Noelle, “That’s his administrative assistant, for real, Dianne Weatherwax, from Brooklyn, graduated from Columbia University in New York. Can you do her?”
“Shoe-uh,” said Noelle.
11
Throughout America, the states were settled by farmers, who mistrusted cities. State after state, when it came time to choose a spot for the capital, it was put somewhere, anywhere, other than that state’s largest city. From sea to shining sea, with the occasional rare exception like Boston in Massachusetts, the same impulse held good. In California, the capital is in Sacramento. In Pennsylvania, the capital is Harrisburg; in Illinois it’s Springfield; in Texas it’s Austin. And in New York State, the capital is Albany. State capitals breed buildings, office buildings, bars, hotels and restaurants, but they also breed parking lots. State-owned automobiles, somber gray and black, usually American-made, utterly characterless except for the round gold state seal on their doors, wait in obedient rows on blacktop rectangles all over Albany, each enclosed in a chain-link fence with a locked gate.
At seven-fifteen on an evening in May, in daylight, under partly cloudy skies with a slight chill in the air, Parker and Wycza stepped up to the chain-link gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the State Labor Department motor pool parking lot on Washington Street. Both wore dark suits, white shirts, narrow black ties. Wycza stood casually watching while Parker quickly tried the keys he held in the palm of his right hand. The third one snapped open the padlock and released the hasp.
While Wycza stood beside the open gate, Parker walked down the row of Chevrolets, his right hand dropping that first set of keys into his trouser pocket while his left hand brought out another little cluster of keys from his outside suitcoat pocket. Switching these to his right hand, he stopped next to one of the cars, tried the keys, and again it was the third one that did it.
The same key started the ignition. Parker drove the black car out of the lot and paused at the curb while Wycza locked the gate and got into the passenger seat, where he scrunched around and pulled his door shut and said, “Couldn’t you find anything bigger?”
“They’re all the same,” Parker told him, and drove off, headed downtown.
As they drove, Wycza took the small bomb from his suitcoat pocket, set it for one forty-five a.m., and put it in the glove compartment. There’d be no way to remove all the fingerprints from this car, so the only thing to do was remove the car.
On State Street, they pulled over to stop in front of a bar with a wood shingle facade. Almost immediately, Lou Sternberg, in a pinstripe dark blue suit and pale blue shirt and red figured tie, came out of the place, briskly crossed the sidewalk and got into the back seat. “I was hoping for a limo,” he said.
Wycza said, “You’re only an assemblyman.”
Parker steered back into traffic, heading downtown and downhill, toward the river.
The Spirit of the Hudsonhad its own parking area, on the landward side of an old converted warehouse, which until the gambling ship arrived had been empty for several years. Now a part of its ground floor had been tricked up with bright paint and plastic partitions and flying streamers and pretty girls in straw hats, and this is where the customers were processed, where they paid for their tickets and signed their waivers to absolve the operators of the ship from any kind of liability for any imaginable eventuality, and received their small shopping bag of giveaways: a pamphlet describing the rules of the games of chance offered aboard, a map of the segment of the Hudson they’d be traveling, pins and baseball caps with the ship’s logo, and a slip of paper warning that chips for the games could only be bought with United States currency; no credit cards.
Parker and Wycza and Sternberg ignored that normal way in. At the far end of the warehouse, a blacktop road led around toward the pier, where supplies would come aboard. Parker steered around that way, and when he got to the guard’s kiosk he opened his window and said, “Assemblyman Kotkind.”
“Oh, yes, sir!” The word had gone out, treat this politico well, we may have a convert. Stooping low to smile in at Sternberg in the back seat, the guard said, “Evening, Mister Assemblyman.” Then, to Parker, he said, “Just go on down there and around to the right. There’s a place for you to park right down there where the people get aboard.”
“Thank you,” Parker said, and drove on.
A pretty girl with a straw hat and a clipboard saw them coming, and trotted briskly over to meet them, smiling hard. Looking in at Parker, she said, “Is this the assemblyman?”
“In the back,” Parker told her. “Do I leave the car here?”
“Oh, yes, fine. No one will disturb it.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Parker and Wycza got out on their own, but the girl opened the rear door for Sternberg, who came out scowling and said, “Are you my escort?”
“Oh, no, sir,” she said. “Someone on the ship will see to you. If you’ll just”
“I’d rather,” Sternberg said, because it seemed like a good idea to be difficult from the very beginning, “meet the person here, be escorted aboard.”
“Oh, well, yes, fine,” she said, her smile as strong as ever. Pulling a walkie-talkie from a holster on her right hip, she said, “Just let me phone up to the ship.”
While she murmured into the walkie-talkie, Parker and Wycza and Sternberg looked over at the stream of passengers coming out of the warehouse and passing along the aisle flanked by red-white-and-blue sawhorses to the short ramp to the ship, that ramp being covered by red-white-and-blue canvas tarp walls and roof. The people seemed happy, cheerful, expectant. It was twenty to eight, and there were already a lot of customers visible moving around on the ship. Friday night; the Spirit of the Hudsonwas going to be full.
“Look at that poor child in the wheelchair,” Sternberg said. “And gambling.”