The idea of knocking over the whole convention had come from Billy, or maybe from Claire, whom Lempke had been wary of from the beginning. When the idea came along Lempke had got hold of Jack French and Parker, and all at once the job had been taken over by Parker, a man who put the stamp of his own cold style on every heist he worked. Parker was cold and solid, and Lempke knew it was only that coldness that was keeping the rest of them together. Billy wanted to fall apart under the pressure, he wanted that the way a torture victim wants to die. Lempke himself felt the weakness of age and worry lapping at the edges of his mind. Otto Mainzer, a crazy man, a destroyer, was being held in check by the authority of Parker.
All he had to do, Lempke told himself, was hold on. Parker was running things, and doing a good job of it, and all Lempke had to do was obey orders, act the way his own training and experience told him to act, and everything would come out fine.
“Lempke.”
He looked around, startled. Parker was in the doorway, looking at him. “Oh!” Lempke said, “I’m coming now.”
Parker turned away, and Lempke hurriedly took the teabag out of the cup, threw it away, and carried the cup into the dining room.
The rest of them were sitting around the table there, Parker at one end and Billy at the other, Otto Mainzer and Mike Carlow on one side, Claire and the empty chair for Lempke on the other. Lempke slid into his chair, putting his teacup down, and Parker said, “Lempke, you looked it over last night. Tell us about it.”
“Right,” Lempke said, and sipped at his tea, but it was still too hot. He put the cup down again and said, “The setup’s no problem.”
“We made sure of everything,” Billy said, looking around for a gold star.
Lempke said, “Shut up, Billy.” He knew how to do this sort of thing, his professionalism was still of use to him here, and so right now he had no patience with Billy. To the table at large he said, “There’s five Pinkertons on duty after the ballroom closes. One in the ballroom itself and one in the security room, both of them with,the doors closed and locked. One in the main display room, also closed and locked. One on plant at a table near the elevators and stairs, and one roaming. The roamer checks the three locked in the rooms every hour on the hour. The night men go to work at ten, when the ballroom closes, and their relief comes on at six. But that could be different tonight, because the ballroom closes at eight.”
Parker said, “How do they work the hour check?”
“The roamer knocks on the door, the man inside opens it, they say a few words back and forth. It didn’t look like they had passwords or signals or anything, but we couldn’t get close enough to be sure. At the two-o’clock check, the roamer brought the inside men sandwiches and coffee. They were delivered from an all-night place across the street from the hotel.”
Lempke reached over and got a manila envelope from where Billy had put it down in front of himself. “I got some pictures,” he said. “And some sketches. So you can see how it works.”
The pictures and sketches were passed around, and then Parker said, “This one from the lobby, shooting up, showing the ballroom doors. Where were you when you took that?”
“Green sofa near the florist stand.”
“From there you can see the roamer make his check?”
“Right.”
“What about contact between security room and ballroom?”
“We used binoculars from sidewalk level across the street,” Lempke said. “The angle was bad, but I’m almost positive that door was open. Anyway, it would make sense, the two men on duty there get to talk to one another.”
“We’ll assume it’s open,” Parker said. “And the best time to hit is two o’clock, when they get the sandwiches and coffee. They’ll both be in the same room, eating together. Lempke, when you’re in that green sofa, can you be seen from the street?”
“Sure. Through the main lobby doors.”
“Good. Claire, you start sitting in that lobby at quarter to two. As soon as both those guards get their food, you give the signal.”
Claire said, “How?”
“You sit with your legs crossed. The signal is, you switch the legs.”
Claire smiled and nodded. “That’s easy,” she said.
“You stick around another ten minutes or so,” Parker told her, “and then you come up with the rest of us.”
“All right.”
Lempke sipped at his tea, which was now at just the right temperature. The tea was warming in his stomach, and the stolid impersonality of Parker was the best kind of reassurance. Lempke felt the pre-heist jitters fading away, felt the old calmness and confidence coming back at last, out of mothballs, out of the past. He hadn’t felt sure of himself since the walls of that Rhode Island prison had closed around him, and it was like meeting an old friend after years of separation to feel this stronger self coming back into his body, taking over the controls again after such a long time.
Lempke smiled to himself. He was going to be all right after all.
Parker was saying to Carlow, “You get the truck there by ten to two. You and Otto set up where I showed you, and then you get where you can see Claire through the lobby doors. I’ll be at the tour office window. When she gives you the sign, you light a cigarette and walk back to the truck. Otto, as soon as things are set up by the truck you come upstairs with the rest of us. I’ll have the door rigged.”
Grinning, Mainzer said, “I’ll be there.”
“We’ll give ourselves fifty minutes,” Parker said. “What we don’t get within that time we leave. Billy, you got that chart for us?”
“Oh, sure,” Billy said, jumping to his feet. “I had it, I had—Lempke’s got it, in the envelope.”
“Relax, Billy,” Lempke said, and handed over the chart. It was done with ruled ink lines on a plain sheet of white paper.
Billy explained the chart at great length, but Lempke didn’t bother to listen, partly because Billy had already explained it to him earlier and partly because the chart was self-explanatory. It was a drawing of the ballroom, showing all the display tables, numbered. Some of the numbers were circled in red, and these were the tables to be concentrated on. Of the hundred and three tables in the ballroom, thirty-seven were marked with red.
When Billy was finally done, Parker looked around at them all and said, “We can do this with fewer men, it’ll just mean we get less of the available goods. Lebatard’s the only indispensable man. Anybody else want out?”
There was silence at the table, until Lempke felt Parker’s eyes on him. He had been feeling so good for the last few minutes that it hadn’t occurred to him at first that Parker, in offering this last out, had been talking mostly to him, but now that it did he smiled broadly and shook his head, saying, “Not me, Parker. I heard the gun and I’m in the race.”
Parker kept looking at him, and Lempke met his eyes. He knew he was all right, so it didn’t matter.
And Parker saw it, too, Lempke knew it, when Parker’s expression changed, became easier, and he said, “Hello, Lempke.”
Three
THE NIGHTS were always the dullest.
Fred Hoffman, fifty-four years of age, had been a Pinkerton employee since the end of the Second World War, when he’d been honorably discharged from the Army, where he’d served in the Military Police, and in all the years of his employ he had never fired his pistol anywhere except on the practice range, and in fact had never so much as heard a pistol fired anywhere but on the range. Not that he minded, most of the time. He wasn’t all that anxious to get involved in shoot-outs. He considered his presence in the blue Pinkerton uniform to be in the nature of a deterrent rather than a challenge. If there was a disturbance, any sort of disturbance, he had already failed in his function, and then he would have to fall back on his secondary function of peacemaker. Up till now, he had never failed in the primary function, and had experienced over twenty years of peacefulness.