“Cash,” Parker said.
Cathman nodded. “A boat swimming in cash,” he said. “Through my access to various government departments, I can obtain virtually any information you could possibly need. Blueprints of the boat, details of security, employee backgrounds, locations of safes, schedules, security arrangements at the two ports where the ship will touch land, being Albany and Poughkeepsie, the turnaround points. The details of any robbery that might take place on the boat, of course, are your concern.”
“And what do you want for this?”
Cathman shrugged inside his expensive topcoat. “I’m a little tired,” he said. “I would like to live in a state with less severe winters, pick and choose my clients with more freedom. If you proceed, and if you are successful, I would like ten percent.”
“You’re gambling,” Parker told him.
Cathman’s smile was wan. “I hope not,” he said. “If I am dealing with professionals, and I know myself to be professional in my own line of work, is that gambling? I don’t think so. You’ll have no reason to begrudge me my ten percent.”
“You’re the inside man,” Parker pointed out. “The law will be looking for the inside man.”
Now Cathman laughed outright. “Me? Mr. Parker, no one in New York State government would suspect me of so much as taking paper clips home from the office. My reputation is so clear, and for so long, that no one would think of me as the inside man for a second. And there would be dozens of others who might have been the ones who helped with inside information.”
Parker nodded. He thought about it. On the river, a black barge full of scrap metal was pushed slowly upstream by a tug, the water foaming white across its blunt prow. Parker said, “When does this boat get here?”
5
Claire said, “What are you going to do?”
“Find out some things,” Parker told her. “Talk to some people who might maybe like to come along. Take my time. It’s at least three weeks before the boat opens for business.”
“There’s something you don’t like about it,” Claire said.
Parker got to his feet and started to pace. They were on the screened porch on the lake side of the house, the chitter of a light spring rain filling the silences around their words. The lake surface was pebbled, with little irruptions where the breeze gusted. Usually the lake was quiet, glassy, reflecting the sky; now it was more like the river he’d been looking at yesterday.
“I don’t like boats,” he said, pacing, looking out at the lake. “To begin with. I don’t like anything where there’s one entrance, one exit. I don’t like a cell. A boat on the water is a cell, you can’t just get up and go away.”
“But the money,” she said.
“Cash.” He nodded. “Cash is the hardest to find and the easiest to deal with. Anything else, you have to sell it, it’s two transactions, not one. So the idea of the cash is good. But it’s still cash on a boat. And besides that, there’s Cathman.”
“What about him?”
“What does he want? Why is he doing this? There’s something off-key there.”
“Male menopause.”
Parker did his barking laugh. “He isn’t chasing a fifteen-year-old girl,” he said, “he’s chasing a boat full of money. And he wants ten percent. Ten percent.”
“It’s a finder’s fee. You’ll bedoing all the work.”
“Why isn’t he greedier? Why doesn’t he want more? Why isn’t he afraid we’ll stiff him? Why does he have to tell me his thoughts about politics and gambling?”
“He’s new to this,” she suggested. “He’s nervous, so he keeps talking.”
“Well, that’s another thing that’s wrong. He says he’s got a perfect rep, nobody would think twice he could be linked up to something like this. So why is he? Why is he taking thirty years of straight arrow and tossing it in the wastebasket for ten percent of something that might not happen? If he never thought this way before, how can he think this way now? What’s different in him?”
“Maybe he lied to you,” she said. “Maybe he’s not as clean as he says.”
“Then the cops will be on him the day after we pull the job, and what he has on me is a name and a phone number.” He stopped his pacing to look around the porch, and then at Claire. “You want to move from here?”
“I like this house.”
He paced again, looking at nothing. “I was thinking, when I was there, yesterday. There was an access road there, went down to the water, right next to the station, with a ramp at the bottom where you could launch a boat. I was thinking, there’s nobody around, nobody even looking at the river, it’s too early in the season. This guy knows two things about me, I could launch him right now, and come home, and forget it. All done.”
She winced a little at the idea, but said, “Why didn’t you?”
“Because he makes no sense,” he told her. He paced the porch as though he were in the cell he’d said he didn’t like. “I want to figure him out. I want to know what’s behind him, what he’s doing, I want to know who he is, what he is, why he moves the way he does. Then I’ll decide what to do about him.” He stopped in front of her, frowning down at her, thinking. “You want to help?”
She blinked, and looked tense. “You know,” she said, “I don’t like … there’s things I don’t like.”
“Nothing with trouble,” he promised. “I’ve got the guy’s calling card. You just spend some time in the library, spend some time on the phone. He’ll have a paper trail. Get me a biography.”
“I could do that,” she agreed. “And what will you be doing?”
“I’ll go talk to a few guys,” Parker said.
6
“Edward Lynch,” Parker said, and extended a credit card with that name on it.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Lynch,” the desk clerk said. She had a neat egg-shaped head with straight brown hair down both sides of it, like curtains at a window, and nothing much in the window. “Pleasant trip?”
“Yes,” he said, and turned away from her canned chatter to look at the big echoing interior of the Brown Palace, Denver’s finest, built around a great square atrium and furnished to let you know that you were in the western United States but that good taste prevailed. On the upper floors, all the rooms were on the far side of the halls, with a low wall on this side, overlooking the lobby. Here and there in the big space, groups of people sat in the low armchairs and sofas, leaning toward one another to talk things over, their words disappearing in the air. But a shotgun mike in any of the upper halls could pick up every conversation in the room.
“Here you are, Mr. Lynch.”
Parker signed the credit card slip and took the plastic key. “I think I have messages.”
She turned, as neatly articulated as a Barbie, and said, “Yes, here we are. Two messages.” She slid the envelopes across the desk toward him. “Will you want assistance with your luggage?”
“No, I’m okay.”
His luggage was one small brown canvas bag; he’d be here only one night. Picking the bag up, stuffing the message envelopes into his jacket pocket, he crossed to the elevators, not bothering to look out over the groups in the lobby. Mike and Dan wouldn’t be there, they’d be waiting for his call, in their rooms.
You don’t meet where you’re going to pull the job, nowhere near it. And you don’t meet anywhere that you’ve got a base or a drop or a contact or a home. Three days ago, just after his conversation with Claire, Parker had started making phone calls, and when he made contact with the two guys he wanted he did a minimum of small talk and then said the same thing both times: “I ran into Edward Lynch the other day. Remember him?” Both guys said yeah, they remembered Edward Lynch, what’s he doing these days? “Salesman, travels all over the country. Said he was going to Denver, meet Bill Brown there on Thursday, then on and on, travel every which way. I’d hate that life.” Both guys agreed that Edward Lynch sure had it tough these days, and they did a little more nonsense talk, and hung up, and now it was Thursday and Parker was here as Edward Lynch, and he had the two messages in his pocket.