“Change the whole coat.”
Claire sipped at her wine, and said, “Maybe he needs money after all. A mid-level civil servant, retired early, maybe it’s rougher than he thought it would be.”
“What about this consultant business?”
Claire shook her head. She sliced duck breast, thinking about it, then said, “I don’t think it’s doing all that well. Mostly I think because he’s advising state governments against gambling and they’re all in favor of it.”
“He told me about that,” Parker agreed. “The pols see it as painless taxes.”
“People don’t want you to consult with them,” Claire said, “if you’re only going to advise them not to do what they’ve already decided they’re going to do. So what jobs he gets, mostly, have to do with fund allocation for mass transit and highways and airports. Here and there, he gets a job doing research for anti-gambling groups in state legislatures, but not that much.”
The music in here was noodling jazz piano, low enough to talk over but loud enough for privacy. Still, when the waitress spent time clearing the main course dishes from the next table, Parker merely ate his steak and drank some of his wine. When she left, he said, “But he isn’t in it for the money, I don’t think. The thing with me, I mean.”
Claire nodded, watching him.
Parker thought back to his dealings with Cathman. “It doesn’t feellike it,” he said, “as though money’s the point. That’s part of what’s wrong with him. If it isn’t money he wants, what doeshe want?”
“You could still walk away,” she said.
“I might. Bad parts to it. Still, it’s cash, that means something.”
“The boat isn’t even here yet,” she pointed out. “You still have plenty of time to be sure about him, learn more about him.”
“You do that,” Parker told her. “His home life now. Wife, girlfriend, children, whatever he’s got. People bend each other; is anybody bending Cathman?”
“You want me to do that?”
“Yes.”
Claire nodded. “All right,” she said, and ate a bit, and then said, “What will you be doing?”
“The river,” Parker said.
9
It was called the Lido, but it shouldn’t have been. It was an old bar, a gray wood cube cut deep into the ground floor of a narrow nineteenth-century brick house, and at two on a sunny afternoon in April it was dark and dry, smelling of old whiskey and dead wood. The shirtsleeved bald bartender was tall and fat, looking like a retired cop who’d gone to seed the day his papers had come through. At the bar, muttering together about sports and politics other people’s victories and defeats were nine or ten shabbily dressed guys who were older than their teeth.
Not looking at any of them, Parker went to the corner of the long bar nearest the door, sat on the stool there, and when the barman plodded down to him like the old bull he was, he ordered beer. The muttering farther along the bar faltered for a minute, while they all tried to work out what this new person meant, but Parker did nothing of interest, so they went back to their conversations.
Parker paid for his beer, drank it, and left, and outside the sunlight seemed a hundred percent brighter. Squinting, he walked down the half block to the Subaru he was still driving no reason not to, and he’d dump it after the job, if the job happened and leaned against its trunk in the sunlight.
He was in Hudson today, a town along the river of the same name, another twenty miles north and upstream from Rhinecliff, where he’d met Cathman at the railroad station. The town stretched up a long gradual slope from the river, with long parallel streets lined like stripes up the hill. At the bottom was a slum where there used to be a port, back in the nineteenth century, when the whalers came this far up the Hudson with their catch to the plants beside the river where the whale oil and blubber and other sellable materials were carved and boiled and beaten out of the cadavers, to be shipped to the rest of America along the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes and the midwest rivers.
The whalers and the whale industry and the commercial uses of the waterways were long gone, but the town was still here. It had become poor, and still was. At one point, early in the twentieth century, it was for a while the whorehouse capital of the northeast, and less poor, until a killjoy state government stepped in to make it virtuous and poor again. Now it was a drug distribution hub, out of New York City via road or railroad, and for the legitimate world it was an antiques center.
The Lido was just about as far from the water as it could get and still be on one of the streets that came up from the river. Where Parker waited in the sunlight he couldn’t see the river at all, just the old low buildings in two rows stretched away along the upper flat and then downslope. Being poor for so long, Hudson hadn’t seen much modernization, and so, without trying, had become quaint.
About two minutes later, one of the shabby guys came out of the Lido, looked around, saw Parker, and walked toward him. He looked to be about fifty, but grizzled and gray beyond his years, as though at one time he’d gone through that whale factory and all the meat and juice had been pressed out of him. His thin hair was brown and dry, his squinting eyes a pale blue, his cheeks stubble-grown. He was in nondescript gray-and-black workclothes, and walked with the economical shuffle Parker recognized; this fellow, probably more than once in his life, had been on the yard.
Which made sense. To find this guy, Parker had made more phone calls, saying he wanted somebody who knew the river and could keep his mouth shut. Most of the people he’d called were ex-cons, and most of the people they knew were ex-cons, so why wouldn’t this guy be?
He stopped in front of Parker, reserved, watchful, waiting it out. He said, “Lynch?”
“Hanzen?”
“That’s me,” Hanzen agreed. “I take it you know a friend of mine.”
“Pete Rudd.”
“Pete it is,” Hanzen said. “What do you hear from Pete?”
“He’s out.”
Hanzen grinned, showing very white teeth. “We’re all out,” he said. “This your car?”
“Come on along.”
They got into the Subaru, Parker pulled away from the curb, and Hanzen said, “Take the right.”
“We’re not going to the river?”
“Not in town, there’s nothing down there but jigs. Little ways north.”
They drove for twenty minutes, Hanzen giving the route, getting them out of town onto a main road north, then left onto a county road. Other than Hanzen’s brief directions, there was silence in the car. They didn’t know one another, and in any case, neither of them was much for small talk.
From the county road, Hanzen told Parker to take the left onto a dirt road between a crumbled barn and a recently plowed field with some green bits coming up. “Corn later,” he said, nodding at the field; his only bit of tour guiding.
This dirt road twisted downward around the end of the cornfield and through scrubby trees and undergrowth where the land was too steep for ready plowing. Then it leveled, and they bumped across railroad tracks, and Parker said, “Amtrak?”
“They always yell when they’re comin,” Hanzen said.
Just beyond the tracks, the road widened into an oval dirt area where a lot of cars had parked at one time or another and a number of fires had been laid. Low ailanthus and tall maples crowded in on the sides, and the river was right there, at the far end of the dirt oval. Its bottom was mud and stone, quickly dropping off. To the left, downstream, three decayed and destroyed small boats lay half in and half out of the water. One of them was partly burned. About ten feet from the bank a gray outboard motorboat pulled at its mooring in the downriver current. A rough-made low windowless cabin painted dark blue covered the front half of the boat.
Parker and Hanzen got out of the car. Hanzen took off his shoes, socks and pants, rolled them in a bundle and put them on the ground. He wore white jockey shorts that bagged on him, as though they’d been washed too many times. He waded out into the water, grabbed the anchor line, and pulled the boat close, then untied the line from the float and used the line to tow the boat to shore, saying as he came in, “I got to keep it out there or the kids come and shoot up in it.” Pointing, “Set it on fire, like that one.”