Stan was enjoying all of this, the preparation, the talk, the gathering of professionals, the gearing up methodically and matter-of-factly for the one grand profitable moment of high drama. He had felt an affinity with Marty Fusco from the first, despite the difference in their ages, and that feeling was even stronger now with Parker. Parker was a man he would follow. He had seen and understood Parker’s mistrust of him when they’d first met, and had been delighted at the gradual shift in Parker’s attitude, until now he was sure Parker’s acceptance of him was almost complete.
That he should find his place at last at the side of a man like Parker didn’t surprise Stan Devers at all. For as long as he could remember he’d been a swimmer upstream, a rebel for the sake of rebellion, anti rules and anti dullness and anti everything that plain stolid ordinary society was for. He’d been thrown out of two high schools and one college — having already, in college, been thrown out of ROTC — he’d been fired from most of the jobs he’d ever held, and that he was surviving four years of Air Force regimentation without earning himself either a Bad Conduct or Undesirable Discharge sometimes amazed him. His troubles in the past had ranged from insubordination through constant absences to the theft of one high school teacher’s car — for a joyride only — and that he had held his natural tendencies in check for three and a half military years now meant not that he’d reformed but that he’d understood at once that the Air Force was a tougher proposition than any school. Hit a teacher and the worst you could get was thrown out. Hit an officer and they’d put you in jail for five years.
His mother had started prophesying jail for him years ago, when he was still in high school. Everything Stan had told Parker about his mother was true; they’d never gotten along and never would. She was now either on her fourth husband or looking for her fifth, he didn’t know or care which. Although he hadn’t really ever given his grandmother — or anybody else — any money, she had truly been the only relative he’d ever had any kind of friendly relationship with, and her death last year had hit him harder than he’d thought anything like that could do. He was now a loner partly by choice and partly by chance, and his being shacked up with Ellen Fusco didn’t to his way of thinking change his loner status a bit. If Ellen thought marriage was somewhere in their future, it wasn’t because he’d ever encouraged the notion. Nor had he contradicted it; it kept her generally tractable.
Until recently, that is. Until this robbery business had come up. Ever since then she’d been a truculent bitch, grousing around like some soap-opera Cassandra, snapping his head off at the slightest pretext. If he’d ever had any idea of taking her with him when he got out of the service, the last couple of weeks had put the kibosh on that. You’d think psychoanalysis would have made her more sensible.
Stan was brooding about this so much he forgot to look at the clock, and the next thing he knew Lieutenant Wormley was coming by his desk, rolled-up magazine in his hand, grinning and saying, “Stan, you’re becoming a positive company man. If the Major could only see you now.”
“Yes, sir,” Stan said. “I’m bucking for civilian.” There was a time when it would have grated on him to call a little punk like Wormley “sir”, but by now the word was automatic. It was one of the painless little things you did to get by, you called the Wormleys “sir”. And if “sir” had one definition for the Wormleys and another definition for Stan, a private definition all his own, that was Stan’s business.
Wormley had to lock up. He stood waiting at the door while Stan and Sergeant Novato got ready. Stan put the camera and the envelope full of photos into a brown paper bag and headed for the door.
Wormley nodded at the bag. “Taking home samples, Stan?”
“You bet, sir.” You bet, you simple son of a bitch.
3
“Stan took pictures of the office,” Ellen said.
“Oh?” Dr. Godden’s voice expressed polite interest. “Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know. That man Parker wanted him to. All kinds of pictures, not just of the office.”
“What else?”
“Oh, the gate, and the outside of the building where he works, and some trucks and buses and things.”
“Well, well” said Dr. Godden. “It does sound as though they’re serious, doesn’t it?”
“I knew they were.”
“It seems you were right,” said Dr. Godden. “Are they hiding their plans from you?”
“No, How could they, they’re using my house! As though I wanted to know what they were doing.”
“Don’t you?”
“I do not,” she told the carpet. “When they start talking, I leave the room right away.”
“Why is that?”
“I hate it!” she burst out, glaring at the patterns in the carpet. “I hate the thought of it, I hate everything they’re doing.”
“Is it only because you’re afraid they’ll be caught, or that Stan will want to keep doing it until he does get caught?”
“I don’t know. How do I know?” She knew she was getting agitated, but she couldn’t help it. “I just hate them being there, doing all that — all that.”
“Well, let’s think about it,” he said. “You say you hate them being there, making their preparations in your house. Is that the point? That it’s your house?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it could be.”
“Do you feel they are violating your hospitality? Or that Stan is betraying you somehow, entering into a plan with your ex-husband?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, frowning at the carpet, trying to think, trying to see if anything Dr. Godden was saying found a response inside her. He did that sometimes, offered one reason for a thing after another until they found the one she responded to, and that was usually it. Even if the response was strongly negative. In fact, if she were to say definitely no to something, nine times out of ten that would turn out to be what the reason was after all.
“Do you object,” he asked her now, “to your husband using your home? Or is this planning just reminiscent of the times when you were married to him, particularly the time when he did get caught?”
“Yes,” she said. She looked briefly directly at him, at those intelligent sympathetic eyes, and then away again.
“That’s it,” she said, knowing it was. “It makes me nervous, them all in the living room, just the way it used to be. I feel, I feel trapped, as though nothing was changed, I’m not really free of Marty after all.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “The reminiscence is there, the similarity with the past. But there are differences, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You are free of your ex-husband. He is there only on your sufferance. That’s a big difference, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes I think I ought to tell them to go someplace else.”
“No!”
He said it so forcefully she was surprised into looking at him again. For just a second his expression seemed to be startled, but then it smoothed again and he said, “Ellen, you can’t run away from things. We’ve talked about that before.”
“Yes,” she said, and faced front again. “I know. You’re right.”
“You should let them stay,” he said. “You should face the problem squarely, understand it, conquer it.”
“I know.”