She put the glasses down on the bureau and held up the bottle for Parker to see. Haig & Haig. “Just off the boat,” she said, and laughed. She had gleaming white false teeth. Inside the young clothes was an old body, but inside the old body was a young woman. Madge wouldn’t let herself be old. It was 1920 and she was as young as the century the Great War was over, Prohibition was in, money was everywhere. It was a grand thing at the beginning of the Jazz Age to be alive and young and a high-priced whore. It would be 1920 around Madge till the day she dropped dead.
“You want ice?” she asked him. “I can go get some ice if you want.”
“Never mind,” said Parker. He wanted to get it over with, get the talking begun and done. Handy was due soon.
She splashed liquor into both glasses, handed him one, and said, “Happy times!”
He grunted. The liquor, when he tasted it, was warm and sour-sharp. He should have had her go for the ice.
She went over and sat on the bed. “What a sourpuss. I just can’t get used to that new face, Parker. You know, I think it’s even worse than the old one.”
“Thanks.” He went over and looked out the window again. When Handy got here, he’d have an excuse to throw Madge out.
“Did I tell you Marty Kabell was here last summer? He had some blonde with him, Christy or something. He had a moustache, too
.”
She talked away at his back as he stood looking out the window. She told him whom she’d seen in the last year, whom she’d heard about, where this one was now, what happened to that one. She was full of information. Some of the names she mentioned Parker didn’t recognize; Madge thought all the people she knew also knew one another. One big happy family. It was part of her still being twenty years old.
A car turned in from the highway and Parker interrupted her.
“You got a customer.”
“Ethel’s minding the store.” Ethel was a cow of a girl, about twenty-five, somewhat retarded. She lived at the hotel and worked for Madge, cleaning the units when they were vacated, sometimes taking over in the office. Where she’d come from and what connection she had with Madge, Parker neither knew nor cared. Some people thought she was Madge’s daughter.
Madge kept talking. Every once in a while she’d pause or ask a question, and Parker would have to rouse himself and reply. Madge liked to talk too much, but she was valuable, and it was worth while to put up with her. Hers was the safest place in eastern Pennsylvania.
Ethel passed by the window, carrying a key, followed by a teenage couple with their arms around each other’s waists. The girl looked frightened; the boy looked intense. After a minute, Ethel came back alone, headed for the office. Behind Parker, Madge still talked. She was asking questions now, trying to store up more information on comings and goings to pass on to the next friend who stopped by. Parker answered in monosyllables “In jail.” “Out in California some place.” “Dead.”
At last another car pulled in from the highway. Parker finished the warm liquor and said no to a second drink. He half-listened to Madge, and half-listened for footsteps on the walk. He heard them and waited, and then there was a knock at the door.
Handy. But, just in case, he said to Madge, “Answer it for me, will you?”
“Sure. You in trouble, Parker?”
“No.”
Madge shrugged, still in a good humour, and went over to open the door. “Hello, Handy! Come on in.”
“What say, Madge?” Handy was tall and lean as a one-by-twelve, with knobby wrists, a bony face, and stiff, dark hair greying over the ears. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and when he took it out it was badly lipped, brown tobacco showing through wet grey paper.
“It’s real good to see you, Handy,” said Madge. “Hold on, I’ll get another glass.”
Parker said, “Later on, Madge.”
“Business,” Madge replied. “It’s always business with you, Parker.” She put a hand on Handy’s arm. “Come on over to the office later, we’ll get drunk.”
“Sure thing, Madge.” Handy grinned, and held the door open for her. She went through and he closed the door and turned to Parker. “She’s a good girl.”
“She talks too much. How’ve you been?”
“So-so. Never any static on that armoured car job. You read the papers on it?”
Parker shook his head. That was three months ago, he and Handy and two others had taken an armoured car in New Jersey. If it wasn’t for this Outfit thing, he’d still be in Florida, living on the take from that job. He and Handy had split it down the middle, because the other two had tried a cross and it hadn’t worked for them.
“They never even got a beginning,” Handy said. He went over to the bureau and crushed his cigarette in the ash tray. It sizzled. Then he pulled a box of small-sized wooden matches from his pocket, got one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Between cigarettes, he always sucked on a wooden match. He turned to Parker and said, “You remember what I told you after that job? I told you it was my last one. I’m retiring.”
Parker nodded. Handy quit after every job he’d been doing it for ten years or more.
“I mean it this time,” Handy told him, as though he knew what Parker was thinking. “I been up in Presque Isle, Maine. They got them an air force base up there, and I’m buying in on a diner, right across the road from the main gate. Open all night, I short-order a good egg when I put my mind to it, so I’ll work the nights myself.”
“Good luck.”
“Damn right.” Handy moved over and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I been in the business too long. I’m a lucky man, Parker. You, too. Both of us, too damn lucky. But there’s no string goes on for ever, and I figure mine’s just about played out. I’ll settle down in the Presque Isle and short-order a few eggs and let the rest of the world go by.” He nodded, and prodded at his teeth with the match.
Handy was wearing grey corduroy pants and a red-and-black hunting jacket. Parker looked at him and could imagine him running a diner, but, at the same time, he knew Handy would come back in whenever he was offered a seat in the game. All the diner meant was that Handy would be going back to the same place every time from now on. But he wouldn’t be turning down any jobs that looked good. He’d driven down to see Parker knowing nothing of the reason for the summons, and his presence here was proof that he wouldn’t be short-ordering eggs everynight for the rest of his life.
Parker pulled the blind down over the window and crossed the room to sit in the easy chair by the bureau. “This isn’t a job I called you about,” he said. “Not the regular kind, anyway.”
“What kind, then?”
Parker filled him in on what had happened, the killer who’d missed, the letters to the pros, taking care of Menner, and knocking over The Three Kings.
Handy listened to it all, poking at his teeth with the match, and when Parker was done he said, “I been thinking. Out of the people I know, there’s at least eight’ll be real happy to get that letter of yours. They’ll go right out and do jobs they been thinking about all these years.” He grinned and nodded. “This Bronson and his friends, I bet they’re hurting right now.”
“They’ll hurt more.” Parker lit a cigarette. “Anyway, I know where Bronson is. I’m going there.”
“What else?”
“I could use a man beside me. I’m not in this one for the dough, so I’ll give you the take from the poker game and The Three Kings. Forty-two hundred. Plus whatever we pick up in Bronson’s house.”