“You don’t know what it’s like on the inside, Parker, you never been.”
Parker had done a little time in a prison farm once, but he knew it wasn’t the same thing, so he let it ride, saying, “If you want clear of this, all you got to do is walk away.”
Lempke’s tiny false teeth gnawed his lower lip. “I need the money,” he said. He looked at Claire, sitting over by the window and doing her nails. He shook his head, saying, “What I want is reassurance.”
“About what?”
Lempke frowned, having trouble getting it out, and finally said, all in a rush, “That you aren’t being influenced. This time.”
Claire looked up from her nails, saying, “You mean me? I thought you knew Parker better than that.”
“I don’t want to go back inside, is all.”
Parker said, “Then walk away.”
“I can’t.”
Parker shook his head and walked around the room. “It’s a bad string,” he said. “One amateur, one scared old man.”
“You never been in,” Lempke said defensively.
“And I won’t be after this one, either.”
Claire abruptly said to Lempke, “Don’t you have any grown children, anybody to take care of you?”
Lempke looked at her blankly, and Parker said, “That isn’t how it works, Claire. Let it go.”
She shrugged, and went back to her nails.
Parker said to Lempke, “You know you got to make up your mind now. If you stay, we don’t talk about it any more.”
Lempke moved his hands like a man feeling his way in the dark. “I’m troubled in my mind,” he said. “There’s so many problems.”
“We’ll do the easy one next year,” Parker said.
“I know, I know.” Lempke gnawed his lower lip some more, then abruptly made a violent shrugging motion that caused the camera to jump and bobble on his waist. “The hell,” he said angrily. “The hell with it. You take the chances or you get out.”
“Which is it?”
“In, in,” Lempke said, still angry. “What am I, dead and buried? I walk around like I’m constipated.” Then, to Claire, “Excuse the indelicacy.”
She gestured with the nail-polish brush, accepting the apology and waving away all offense.
“All right,” Parker said. “We want pictures.”
“I’m your man.” Lempke was standing straighter, looking determined, meeting Parker’s eye; kidding himself.
Parker didn’t push. He said, “The ballroom, all angles. Mezzanine, all angles. Lobby, both exits and stairs and elevators. Street, this sidewalk and the street itself, the front of the hotel with the ballroom windows, the building next door. And inside, next door, there’s an outfit called Diablo Tours. We want the inner office, rear wall and window. You got color in that camera?”
“Sure. Nothing but the best.”
“Good. I want pictures of an electric company repair truck, all angles. At work, if you can find one.”
Lempke cocked his head to one side. “You already got it worked out?”
“Just a general idea. Better get started.”
“Right!” Lempke went into a flurry of activity, moving his hands and feet and head, demonstrating enthusiasm and capability, then all at once stopped everything and looked at Parker with gray eyes and said heavily, “Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.”
“Good.”
“Lempke’s still down inside here,” he said, patting his chest. “He’ll come out when we need him.”
“I know that,” Parker lied.
“See you at Billy’s tonight.”
“Nine o’clock.”
Lempke left, and Claire got to her feet, holding her hands out with fingers spread. “He shouldn’t be like that, should he?” she said.
“No.”
“Will he really be all right?”
“Probably not.”
“What are you going to do?”
Parker shrugged. “Give him a chance to find out for himself.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He’s right about one thing,” Parker said. “He’s still a pro down inside. If he should get out, sooner or later he’ll know it, and he’ll get out.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” she insisted.
“I said he will.”
She looked at his face, and didn’t ask again.
Two
BILLY’S BASEMENT looked like an antique store in a blackout. The ceiling was low, made of hole-pocked white squares of soundproofing, with two fluorescent light fixtures with frosted glass. The floor was concrete, painted gray too long ago. The walls were lined with shelves, cabinets, drawers, narrow display cases, stacks. A large wooden table in the middle of the room contained a postage scale, stacks of manila envelopes, flat pieces of cardboard, a broad roll of brown wrapping paper, a sponge and a glass bowl, trays of stamps. A rolltop desk, shut and locked, was at the end near the stairs. Through a doorway at the other end could be seen the furnace.
When the four of them came downstairs, Lempke immediately went to the wooden chair by the mailing table and sat in it like a man waiting for death. In the fluorescent light his face had no color, except for faint grayness around the mouth and under the eyes. When he’d come back from taking his pictures, all the false strength had been gone. He’d said almost nothing since then.
Claire stayed in the shadow by the foot of the stairs, arms folded, as Parker followed Billy over to one of the display cases along the right-hand wall. Billy said, “This is how it’ll be, all the coins out like this.”
Parker looked in the display case and saw coins laid out in rows, each on a small square of orange paper. On each piece of paper, above and below the coin, was writing in pen: a price, and abbreviations.
Billy said, “I have some local customers, that’s why I have these out like this. But most of my business is mail order.”
Parker said, “Show me how this stuff is transported.”
“That’s over here.”
Billy moved fussily away. Since the scene in the hotel room this afternoon, a change had come over him. He was all efficiency now, helpful and businesslike. He’d obviously decided his only course was to hold himself in until after the robbery, in hopes that Parker would then simply go away again and leave him with a clear path to Claire. How much of this he’d figured out for himself, and how much Claire had put into his head, Parker neither knew nor cared. Just so Billy stopped being a problem, that was all that mattered.
“Some people,” Billy was saying, picking up a black suitcase and opening it on the glass top of one of the display cases, “carry their things this way. I do, too, when I’m going to have a lot. One of the bigger conventions.”
The interior of the suitcase was all many-layered compartments. Billy demonstrated how coins were nested in these compartments, all of which were lined with felt. Parker, watching, saw it would be a long job for anyone not used to it, though Billy’s hands moved with practiced speed, filling each compartment.
“All right,” Parker said. “I got the idea. What’s the other way?”
Billy immediately moved away from the suitcase, saying, “Some people, if they don’t have too much, they might carry things this way.” He took a small wooden cabinet down from a shelf, carried it over to the mailing table, put it down there. From the way he carried it, it was heavy. About sixteen inches high, six inches wide, a foot deep, it was all narrow drawers, with tiny round drawerpulls down the front, making it look like the control panel in a Victorian elevator.
“The advantage of this,” Billy said, taking a drawer out and setting it down on the table, “is you don’t really have to unpack. You just spread the drawers out on your table.”
The drawers were lined with felt and full of coins. Parker said, “How careful do you have to be, carrying this kind of thing?”