The phone rang at eleven-thirty. They were sitting up, smoking cigarettes, and she reached to the bedside extension, spoke into it, and then passed the phone to Parker, saying, ‘It’s for you. Thank him for not calling five minutes ago.’
Parker said, ‘Hello.’
‘Was that a lady I heard, with that bedroom voice?’
‘Grofield?’
‘Talking to you is like having a chat with one of the statues on Easter Island. How are you, Parker?’
It was Grofield, always amusing himself with his own dialogue. But he was a good man, reliable on a job and perfect for this one. Parker said, ‘There’s an investment you might be interested in.’
‘Having just had a theatre shot out from under me by the Philistines, I can tell you your statement is succinct and pithy but perhaps underplayed.’
‘You’ll like this one. Unlimited front money and guaranteed return.’
‘Two impossibilities in one sentence. I’m intrigued.’
‘How soon can you get here?’
‘This afternoon. I’m in New Orleans.’
Parker gave him the address of Crystal’s apartment, and Grofield said, ‘Full explanations when I get there, Parker, none of your bloody monosyllables.’
‘All right.’
Parker gave the phone back to Crystal thinking the explanation on this job would take a long time in the telling. But that was later. He stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘Better leave the phone off the hook.’
5
IT was hard to tell where the explanation should start. This job had come along because of Parker’s connection with the Outfit, which was what the organized rackets boys were calling themselves these days, so maybe the beginning of the explanation was how Parker first got involved with the Outfit.
Parker and the Outfit had one thing in common; they both worked outside the law. But the Outfit lived on gambling and narcotics and prostitution, the Outfit lived by finding customers for illegal products and services, and Parker simply went where money was and took it away. He scored once or twice a year, almost always institutional robberies banks, payrolls, jewellery stores, armoured cars and almost always with a group of three or four other professionals in the same line of work. The personnel of the group would change from job to job, depending on who was lining up the string and what the operation required. Over the last nineteen years Parker had worked with about a hundred different men.
One of these men, Mal Resnick, had worked a doublecross in a job with Parker, and had used Parker’s share to pay back an old debt to the Outfit. Parker had caught up with Resnick and settled accounts, but he’d had to exert pressure to get his money back from the Outfit. A man named Bronson had been running the Outfit then, and when Bronson had insisted on trying to have Parker killed, Parker had worked an arrangement with the man in line to succeed Bronson, a guy named Walter Karns. Parker had eliminated Bronson, and Karns had called off the feud.
Now he had heard from Karns again, a roundabout message asking only that Parker meet with Karns in Las Vegas. The message had included plane fare and had hinted at a large amount of money, so Parker went.
They met in a hotel suite on the Strip; it was their first meeting face to face. They were both big men, Parker thirty-eight and Karns ten or fifteen years older. The difference between them was that Parker looked to be made of chunks of wood, while Karns had a meaty padded look to him, like a wrestler gone to seed.
‘The situation is simple,’ Karns said. ‘We’ve got a competitor and we don’t like competitors. Mostly we take care of competitors ourselves, but this is an unusual case. It’s so unusual I’ve decided maybe we ought to ask you to take care of the problem for us.’
‘I don’t kill for hire,’ Parker told him.
‘Don’t I know that? Don’t I have boys who do, a payroll choked with them? No, Parker, I don’t want you for a job I could get done better by any one of a dozen people on my own payroll. I want you for the kind of job you do best, I want you for your specialty. I want you to rob this competition, I want you to clean him out, strip him to the bone, leave him naked.’
‘Why?’
Karns shrugged. ‘Because there’s no other way we can get at him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Now you’re asking the question, now you’ve touched on the main point. What is it that makes this problem unique? Did you ever hear of the island of Cockaigne?’
‘No.’
‘It’s in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, about forty or fifty miles south of Galveston. Up till six years ago it was deserted, nobody on it, nothing there anybody wanted. Nobody owned it. It’s forty miles from the United States and about two hundred and thirty from Mexico, but neither one of them ever wanted it bad enough to stake a claim. It was such a nothing the Seabees didn’t even build an airfield on it in the Second World War, which makes it almost the only one they missed.’
Karns pulled at his gin and tonic. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘along came a guy named Baron. Wolfgang Baron, that’s what he calls himself. He showed up on the island with nothing but time and money. He hired construction crews out of Galveston to come out and build him a casino and some other buildings, and when the Feds took a look at him it turned out Cuba had just finished going through the paperwork at the UN and the island was theirs. So the Galveston construction crews quit on him, and he brought Mexican crews up from Matamoros instead and they finished the job. When everything was done he called the place Cockaigne, because it never even had a name before, and he opened for business.’
Karns finished his drink and hollered. A sallow young guy in a black suit came in from another room and made fresh drinks for both Karns and Parker; then he went out again.
Karns said, ‘You ever hear this name before, Cockaigne?’
Parker shook his head.
‘One of my lawyers told me what it is,’ Karns said. ‘There was an old legend in the old days in England about a country called Cockaigne where everything was great. Streets made of sugar, doughnuts growing on the trees and like that. Like the song about the big rock candy mountain. Idleness and luxury, that was Cockaigne, and that was what this bird Baron called his gambling island.’
Parker didn’t care about legends in the old days in England. What he cared about was what Karns wanted from him right now. But he knew the only thing to do with these people full of unimportant details was wait them out; sooner or later they’d get to the point.
Karns was saying now, ‘You see what this guy Baron had in mind, something like the old gambling ships used to stay just outside the twelve-mile limit, we used to operate a couple of them ourselves, but with Baron it’s more complicated than just a ship. He finds himself an island situated just right, makes a deal with a country to claim it and then leave him alone with it, and he’s set. He gets a lot of his business from the yacht and small boat trade in the Gulf, and the rest of it from the rich Texans. They come from Houston and San Antonio and Corpus Christi and Austin. They come from as far away as Dallas and New Orleans. They spend money on that God damn island like the stuff was going out of style, and not a penny of it comes to us.’
Karns got to his feet, began to pace the room. His face and voice and movements showed him feeling again an old irritation that hadn’t eased with time. ‘For six years,’ he said, ‘that son of a bitch has sat out there and laughed at us. We told him he couldn’t operate without us, we offered him a fifty-fifty split, and he told us to go to hell. He never moves off that island so we can get at him, and as long as he’s on the island he’s safe from us. We can’t pressure him with our own law people because he’s outside everybody’s jurisdiction.’