What the disagreement was neither of them particularly knew or cared. “They rubbed each other the wrong way, they were enemies, they were waiting for the communal task to be finished and then they would be at each other’s throats—that was all they knew and all they had to know.
Mainzer was not entirely honoring this truce, finding small, indirect ways to irritate Carlow. Like the placement of the coin cases; it would have been just as easy, and more sensible, for him to put them on the tailgate when bringing them out to the truck, but instead he ostentatiously put them down in the street directly behind the truck, leaving the smaller and lighter Carlow the job of lifting them up and putting them inside. He did this the first three trips downstairs, but on the fourth trip Carlow was already in the truck, way back in the darkness at the end, and when Mainzer put the cases down in the street Carlow called, with heavy sarcasm, “In here, Tarzan.”
Mainzer smiled thinly, “Sure thing, pal,” he said, picked one of the cases up, set it on the truck bed, and gave it a hard push toward Carlow, trying to knock him off his feet with it. Carlow jumped to the side, the case thudded into the ones already stacked in place, and Carlow put his hand inside his overall pocket saying, “Send the other one that way, buster.”
“Whatever you want, pal,” Mainzer said, but he pushed the second case in more gently than the first, and after that he put the cases inside the truck instead of outside.
It was on his way up after his fifth trip that he ran into Parker’s bitch, also on the way in. Claire, her name was, and he had to admit she was a good-looking piece. But probably frigid.
The educated ones with the cool good looks and the clothes right out of the fashion magazines, they were the frigid ones, nine times out of ten. The only ones that wanted it were the dumb fatties, and they were the ones that Mainzer had no taste for. Because of this, he very rarely had any sort of relations with a woman, and when he did have anything going it was always short-lived, the woman invariably turning out to be either dumb or frigid. He didn’t know why that was so, or how other men got around the problem, but on the other hand he didn’t care a hell of a lot either. They were better things to do with the male body than laying it on some woman. The big times in his life had mostly happened at night, but never in bed.
Like stomping Carlow, for instance. He was going to enjoy that. And Parker, too. In fact, with Parker he’d enjoy it even more, because it would be tougher to work out.
In any case, Mainzer wasn’t primarily a ladies’ man. Still, he had an image to maintain and a view of life to re-confirm, which was why he’d greeted Claire on first meeting her with a bluntly phrased suggestion, and why, on running into her again at the office building doorway now, he said, “Change your mind yet, honey?”
She gave him a look of cool contempt—which he knew to be phony—and went on ahead of him into the building. He followed her up the stairs, watching the way her hips moved. He thought of other things he might say to her, but he kept silent. He also thought briefly of grabbing her in the hallway, giving her a quickie in payment for that look of contempt, but he put that idea out of his mind right away. He’d tried something like that once, years ago when he was younger and thought all women wanted it, thought frigidity was always a fake, thought all you had to do was climb aboard and they’d sigh, “Oh, yes, I do want it!” Instead of which, he’d suddenly found his arms full of grizzly bear. That little bitch had been the worst, dirtiest, most vicious and violent fighter he’d ever come up against in his life. She bit, clawed, scratched, kicked, gouged, butted, kneed, elbowed and generally tried to rip his skin off. He’d finally had to knock her out, in self-defense, and he never did get into her pants, though when he’d looked at her lying there on that floor unconscious he’d had half a mind to go ahead and do it anyway. The thought that she might wake up halfway through had stopped him.
And the memory of her had stopped him on every similar occasion since then, including now. He followed Claire on into the Diablo Tours office, and when she bent to go through the hole in the wall the only desire he had was to kick her for a field goal.
Until Claire’s arrival, things had been slow for Mainzer, with pauses after every trip while he waited for two more cases to be gotten ready, but now that Claire was helping pack it went faster, and Mainzer moved constantly back and forth between tour office and truck. In the ballroom, he knew, Lempke and Claire and Billy were all packing the coin cases, while Parker sometimes packed and sometimes carried the full cases out of the office.
Mainzer kept track, and by ten minutes to three he had made twenty-seven round trips. With two cases each time, that meant fifty-four cases of coins already stowed in the truck. Going into the building for the twenty-eighth time, about to start up the stairs, Mainzer sensed movement in the darkness behind him, and turned. The piece of pipe glanced off the side of his head and pounded onto his shoulder, bringing blinding pain. He made a sound high in the back of his throat, sagged, weaved, and the indistinct figure in front of him swung again. This time he saw the pipe a fraction of an inch in front of his eyes, coming with the speed of fury.
Five
MIKE CARLOW wasn’t entirely sure which he liked least, Mainzer or this cruddy truck, but he thought it was probably the truck. He hadn’t liked it when he first saw it, covered with canvas, in the backyard of Lebatard’s house, and he’d liked it even less after he and that bastard Mainzer had taken the canvas off, and he’d begun to really despise it once he was behind the wheel and had the rotten thing in some kind of motion. He didn’t like the transmission, he didn’t like the engine, he didn’t like the springs, he didn’t like the seat or the steering wheel or the tires, and most of all he didn’t like the idea of pushing this orange lemon around the city streets with a million dollars’ worth of hot coins stowed away in the back.
A vehicle, to Mike Carlow, was something that got you from point A to point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance between. This was the ideal, not yet attained either in Detroit or Europe, and Carlow judged everything with wheels and an engine on how close it came to reaching the ideal. And this truck Parker had given him to drive was the bottom of the barrel, was further from the ideal than anything else he could think of, with the possible exception of a power lawn mower.
Carlow was a racing driver, and in his high-school days had pushed a lot of clunkers around a lot of stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he’d designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of gasoline in the gas tank, because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be insanely dangerous to build a car in which the driver vi was completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” And had lived his life from the same point of view ever since.
If racing cars didn’t cost so damn much to design and build and care for Mike Carlow wouldn’t from time to time be reduced to driving abortions like this stinking truck. He worked on jobs like this maybe once a year, less if he could afford it, and only to raise enough cash to support his automobiles. Sure, he could sell out to one of the big companies, be in essence nothing more than a test pilot for them, trying their engineers’ bright new ideas in racing cars financed by them, owned by them, and merely driven by him, but that wasn’t his idea of racing. Any car he drove had to be his car, and his designs were still as wild as the track officials would permit. Because of this, and because he was one of the most aggressive drivers in the business, he had racked up more than his share of cars, leaving himself with marks of his occupation all over his body. More important, to his way of thinking, he’d also occasionally reduced thousands of dollars’ worth of automobile to a hundred dollars’ worth of scrap, and every time that happened he either had to dip into the kitty if there was one or hire himself out to people like Parker and Lempke again, to take them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. Or to drive some piece of garbage like this improbable truck.