“I know you can beat me up,” Billy said.
“You came here to make me beat you up,” Parker told him. “Because the only thing you think you can hope for from Claire is pity.” He opened his eyes and sat up and looked at Billy. “You know how you make pity? One jigger guilt, one jigger contempt. But Claire’s got nothing to be guilty about over you.”
“I’d rather this whole thing was called off, I’d rather—”
“Did you ever notice,” Parker said, lying down again, putting his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling, “that funny scar she’s got low on her stomach, a kind of crescent shape? How do you suppose she got that?”
There was nothing Billy could say to that. He was just coming to that understanding, and to the knowledge that the only move left to him was to rush at Parker and start hitting him with his fists, when the door opened and Claire came in, saying, “Billy isn’t— Oh, here he is!”
Parker said, “Go out and walk around the halls and come back in.”
Billy said, “No! You ought to hear this, too. I want—”
“That’s all,” Parker said. He got to his feet, saying, “It’s off. The two of you get out of here.”
Claire said, “Billy, if you gum things up…”
“All I wanted—”
“Go home, Billy,” she said.
A sulky sullen child, Billy wagged his head back and forth, saying, “He has no right—”
” For the last time, Billy.”
Reluctant, pouting, Billy scuffed out of the room.
Claire shut the door behind him and said to Parker, “It won’t happen again. I promise.”
Parker was at the window. Far below was the street, this room being on the same side as the ballroom. He stood looking down, trying to balance the pros and cons, trying to decide whether it was worth it to hang on a little longer.
She came over and stood just behind him. “I gave Lempke the message,” she said. “He’s on his way, with a Polaroid.”
Parker kept looking out the window.
Tentatively she touched his arm. “I promise,” she said.
There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. He shook himself and turned around. “Let’s see the maps,” he said.
PART TWO
One
WITH A camera slung around his neck, Lempke looked like a retired postal clerk, off on a world tour, who somewhere along the line has made a left turn when the rest of his charter group (“14 Days, 21 Countries!”) made a right. He stood in the middle of Parker’s hotel room, shoulders slumped as though the camera were dragging him down, seeming to be waiting for somebody to come along and find him. He said:
“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.”
