‘Sure thing.’ She’d been lying in bed, reading, wearing an orange sweater and black stretch pants. She got up and stepped into shoes and followed him into the living room.
Parker said, ‘From now on, the contact with the Outfit is through Grofield and Crystal. Grofield’s going to want some stuff, some money and maybe other things, and he’ll talk through you. Right?’
Crystal smiled at Grofield. ‘I don’t care,’ she said.
‘I don’t mind myself,’ Grofield told her.
Salsa got to his feet. ‘Time for us to leave. See you soon, Parker.’
‘Right.’
Grofield and Salsa headed for the door, Grofield saying to Crystal, ‘I may need lots of stuff. All kinds of stuff.’
‘You just come and talk to me,’ she said.
‘Count on it, honey.’
They left, and Parker went to the bedroom to pack. Crystal came after him and stood in the doorway saying, ‘You going away?’
‘Got to. Part of it.’
‘You have to leave this minute? It couldn’t wait half an hour?’
He barely listened to her, didn’t get what she meant. His thoughts now were limited to the job. He said, ‘Now’s the best time,’ and finished packing.
She sulked when he left, but it was wasted; he never saw it.
THREE
1
GROFIELD walked into the department store, took an elevator up to the second floor and the stairs back down, left through a different door to a different street, flagged a cab and rode three blocks, then jumped from the cab into a city bus. By then he’d lost two of the three Feds tailing him, and the third was riding pretty anxious in a cab just behind the bus.
Straphanging in the bus, Grofield considered. Should he lose the third one, too? Then let them find him again back at the motel.
There was no point in any of this, it was just Grofield’s way to fill the dull spaces. Eight days of inactivity were stretching out like a rubber band towards the robbery at the far end, and Grofield had stood three days of it before going dramatic. Men like Parker and Salsa could just sit there, silent and patient, waiting for the moment to go to work, but Grofield wasn’t built like that.
There was an air of dark energy around Grofield, a nervous predatory pacing. He wasn’t a man who liked to be still. In his acting work he was most often cast as a heavy, either a villain or some sort of sick weakling, and he himself was proudest of his performance as Iago, a lean and sensual and catlike Iago, in a tent theatre production of Othelloin Racine, Wisconsin. Had he gone to Hollywood he would have made his fortune in television, and he knew it, but television was not for him. He was dedicated, sincere, juvenile; only the legitimate theatre was worth the expenditure of true acting talent.
There’s a good living in the legitimate theatre for a very few, and a rotten living for a great multitude. Never having made it big, and being so weighed down with acting integrity it was unlikely he ever would make it big, Grofield was a member of acting’s underpaid multitude. But his other profession the vocation he practised every year or so with men like Parker and Salsa and Ross supported him just fine, made it possible for him to remain an actor, keep his integrity, and still live as well as he wanted.
The two professions complemented one another. The robberies helped him in his characterizations of the roles he was so often given to play, and the acting ability more than once had come in handy in the course of a robbery. Both professions appealed to the same urgent, dramatic, energetic streak in him, and in spending his time between them Grofield was a happy man.
Except for inactivity. He couldn’t stand to have nothing to do, to be forced to wait.
This time, he had lasted three days. Each evening he and Salsa went out to the island, had dinner, watched the cockfights, gambled a little, and finally came back to shore; that time was pleasant, bearing a kind of muted drama. But the mornings and afternoons were just empty, and emptiness was what Grofield couldn’t stand. For three days he’d filled the dead hours as best he could with movies, but by now he’d seen every movie in the Galveston area he wanted to see, and a few he didn’t want to see, and so today there was nothing for it but to play games.
It had taken him half an hour of erratic, pulsing, random motion around Galveston and Texas City and LaMarque before he had been sure how many Federals were following him and what each of them looked like. Another half hour of prowling, starting and stopping, hurrying and creeping, turning and back-tracking, had made him familiar with their methods. Now, in five minutes of razzle-dazzle, he’d cut them from three to one, and he knew he could get rid of the third any time he wanted. The question was, did he want?
Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not. Already Parker had dusted them off his tail; if now Grofield did the same thing, they might not wait around for him to show back at the motel. They might grab Salsa right away, seeing as Salsa would be all they’d have left. They might just louse up the whole operation if Grofield played too many games with them.
Grofield shrugged. At the next stop, he swung down off the bus and walked back to the cab parked half a block away. The Fed was playing it as cagey as possible under the circumstances, staying in the cab until he saw exactly what Grofield was going to do next.
Grofield strolled back and stuck his head in the cab window. ‘I’m going back to the motel now,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Why don’t we take the same cab and save us some money?’
The Fed looked at him with disgust. Federal agents were all alike; upright, honest, courteous, kind, self-righteous, and humourless. ‘Take your own cab,’ he said.
‘You’re wasting the taxpayers’ money,’ Grofield told him.
The Fed didn’t say anything. He turned his head and looked stonily out the other window. Up front the cabby was grinning and trying not to show it.
‘Have it your own way,’ Grofield said. ‘I’ll see you later.’ He straightened up and started away, then changed his mind and went back, saying, ‘Correction, I’m not going back to the motel. I’m going first to see the fair Crystal, and thenI’m going back to the motel.’
The Fed turned and looked at Grofield. ‘I have patience,’ he said. ‘I have patience and I can wait.’
Grofield grinned at him. ‘You remind me of Parker,’ he said. ‘The two of you, sparkling, scintillating, a million laughs.’ He waved, and went away again, and this time flagged a cab and rode it to Crystal’s apartment house.
He had an excuse for going, if not exactly a reason. Crystal was his contact with the Outfit, from whom all blessings flowed, including the money Grofield and Salsa were spending every night out on the island of Cockaigne, and it was more or less true they needed more cash. They had enough to last another couple of days, so he was rushing things a little going to see Crystal now, but he felt up, he felt tense and expectant, the little bit of horseplay with the Federal agents had only whetted his appetite for more.
The other cab trailed along like something attached by a string. Grofield looked back at it from time to time and laughed, picturing the Parker-like face of that Federal man back there. When he got out of the cab at Crystal’s place he paused long enough to wave at the Fed before going on into the building.
Grofield heard music, movie-type background music. He heard it all the time, in every part of his life. For the last half hour or so the music had all been of cops-and-robbers movie type, with a lot of drums and trumpets and syncopation, but now as he went up in the elevator to Crystal’s apartment the music changed, became light, frothy, semi-comic, the kind of music that backs Jack Lemmon or Cary Grant on their way to see Shirley MacLaine or Doris Day. Grofield strode out of the elevator whistling and did a little dance step in the middle of the hall.