Parker went on up to his room. He neither undressed nor turned on a light, but went over in the dark to his bed and lay down there on his back, looking up into the darkness.
There was no place he wanted to go, but he knew he wouldn’t be getting to sleep until he’d made some sort of decision about tomorrow. He thought about going out again, looking for a woman, but at one o’clock on a Wednesday night in Indianapolis the prospects were probably very bad.
He thought about all the towns he knew, all the places he’d ever been, from Miami to Seattle, from San Diego to New York, and there was nothing good to be said about any of them.
He lay looking up into the darkness at the ceiling, and his nerves were starting to jump again.
Five
WHOEVER WAS knocking at the door wouldn’t quit, so after a while Parker got up and went to see who was there. He didn’t turn the light on this time, because he didn’t care about whoever this was.
Claire. She said, “I thought you were asleep. At the desk, they said you were in.” She was looking at the darkness of the room behind him, and registering the fact that he was dressed.
Parker said, “Billy sent you to sex me back in. Tell him forget it.”
She shook her head. “Billy doesn’t send me anywhere,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong idea about us.”
“I don’t have any ideas about you. Go home.”
But she wouldn’t. Pressing one hand against the door, she said, “Do you really think Billy’s the one behind this idea? Do you really think he’s got the brains to know what time it is?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter whose idea it is,” he said. “It’s still sour.”
“It doesn’t have to be, I know it doesn’t. Let me in, let me talk to you.”
“There’s no point,” he said, but he felt his restlessness winning out over logic. Not urging him to get back into Billy Lebatard’s harebrained scheme, but just to spend some time with,this woman; listen to her, bed her, fill an hour or so till he could sleep.
She sensed his indecision, but maybe not its cause, and pressed the point, leaning inward toward him, palm still pressed flat against the door. “Just let me talk to you for five minutes. Five minutes.”
Abruptly he shrugged and stepped back and said, “Come in then.”
She went past him into the darkened room, and he shut the door. In the dark her disembodied voice said, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”
“I can concentrate this way,” he said. “You just talk, I’ll listen.”
“I can’t see anything,” she complained.
He walked past her, knowing where the bed was, and stretched out on it. “You don’t have to see,” he said. “Just talk.”
“Why do you have to pressure me like this?”
“You came here,” he reminded her.
In the next silence he could hear her taking out her pride and looking at it and deciding it wasn’t worth the gesture and putting it away in a box till some time when she could tie the score. When next she spoke, her voice was level and flat and emotionless: “Where do I find a chair?”
“To your left, and back.”
She found it without stumbling into anything, and waited till she was seated before lighting a match and putting it to a cigarette. Looking at her in the small yellow light, he felt the first surge of specific desire for this individual woman. He looked up at the ceiling and watched the shadows there until the match went out.
She said, “It’s nine days from now, in this hotel.”
“They must have scraped out Lempke’s skull, up there in the big house.”
“Why?”
“He’s forgotten everything he ever knew. You and Lebatard, you’re amateurs, but Lempke should know.”
“What should he know?”
“Number one, you don’t meet in the town where you’re going to make the hit. Number two, you don’t stay in the hotel where you’re going to make the hit. Number three, you don’t take a job on consignment; we’re in the wrong business to take your Billy to court if he doesn’t pay.”
“You can kill him.”
“How much does that make me?”
“I mean, Billy won’t try to cheat you because he’s afraid of you. All of you. He knows if he doesn’t pay, you’ll kill him.”
There was nothing to say to that, so Parker simply closed his eyes and waited.
After a minute, she said, “I know there’s a certain amount of risk in this, but there’s risk in it every time, isn’t there?”
When she kept waiting for an answer, he said, “Don’t put those silences in, I’ll go to sleep.”
“Well, isn’t there risk all the time?”
“You’re here to tell me, not ask me.”
“All right. My husband was a pilot with Transocean. Billy is his sister’s husband’s brother. When my husband was killed, Billy started hanging around. I told him no, but he keeps saying he just wants to be my friend, he wants to help me. I need a lot of money, and I told him so, and he said he’d get it for me.”
Parker said, “You told him you wouldn’t give, but you would sell.”
“If he wants to take it that way, it isn’t my fault. He said he wanted to help, and I knew what I needed, and I told him. He’s done this kind of thing before, you know. Hire people to steal from other coin dealers. Except for the really rare ones, coins arc absolutely untraceable.”
“You need more than he can get from a simple dealer heist?”
“I need seventy thousand dollars.”
“Seventy grand. That’s friendship.”
“What I do is my business.”
“Right. And what I don’t do is mine.”
There was a pause, and then she said, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry. I know how it sounds, but I do what I have to do.”
“Take off your clothes.”
The silence this time had sharp edges on it, and so did her voice when she said, “That’s your price?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll get someone else.”
He let her reach the door, and then he said, “Your line was,’ I do what I have to do.’ But that’s a lie, you wear your pride like it’d keep the cold out. What you mean is, you despise Lebatard and don’t care what you do to him.”
She shut the door again, bringing back the darkness. She said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Another rule,” he said. “Don’t work with anyone you can’t trust or don’t respect.”
“You have too many rules,” she said.
“I haven’t been inside. Lempke has.”
“What would you have done if I had taken my clothes off?”
“Taken you to bed and left in the morning.”
“Maybe it isn’t pride,” she said. “Maybe I’m just smart.”
Parker laughed and sat up. “No more life story,” he said.
“Tell me the caper.”
Six
“THIS WILL be the bourse room,” she said. “There’ll be tables around the walls and two ranks of tables down the middle of the room, with one aisle going all the way around.”
They were in the ballroom on the hotel mezzanine. It hadn’t been used for anything tonight, and was open and empty, a long rectangular room with tall windows down at the far left end. A bluish-white streetlight gleamed in on the bare wood floor, making the place look like a basketball court in off-season. The wall opposite the doors was covered from end to end in maroon plush drapes, and the wall at the right bore a large historical mural, heavy with Indians.
“Down here,” she said, and led the way to the left. Down in the far corner, near the windows, was a small inconspicuous door in the long wall. Opening it, she said, “This will be the security room. Where the dealers will keep everything Thursday night.”
It was a small bare room, empty except for a cream telephone sitting on the floor. There was one window, through which the streetlight angularly shone. Looking out, Parker saw the hotel marquee down to his left, and the wide empty street outside.
“There should be a hundred dealers at this one,” Claire said. “Seventy or eighty will get in Thursday night and check their stock in here.”