Parker nodded.
Billy stood in the middle of the room, shifting his weight back and forth, fiddling with his fingers. Parker kept looking out of the window. A little girl in a pink dress went by on a red tricycle. A black Buick convertible, its radio playing rock and roll, cruised by with its top down. The two kids inside it wore their hair as long as Veronica Lake.
Billy said, “About Claire.”
Parker uptilted the beer bottle, swallowed, looked out at the street.
Billy cleared his throat. He said, “You don’t want her. I mean, not really. Not to marry or anything like that.”
Parker turned his head and looked at Billy and said, “You can’t let it alone, can you?”
“You may not believe this,” Billy said earnestly, “but I love that girl. I really do. I’m in love with her.”
Parker looked out the window again.
“I mean,” Billy said, “when this is all over, you’ll just go away and leave her here. Right? It doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s just a girl for now, for a few days, while you’re here.”
Parker nodded. “That’s what you want to hear,” he said. “That the competition’s going away.”
“Well. This sort of thing happens to you all the time, doesn’t it? I mean, you meet a girl, it’s just for a little while, then you move on, you go someplace else, it’s all over.”
Parker watched the street. What Billy had just said was right, had become increasingly right in the last few years. As women had become less individually important to him, a faceless quantity of them had become much more important. As though he were in some strange way really monogamous, true to a faceless nameless personality-less body, so that he never involved himself with anyone else, only her, time after time after time.
He had been married once, but she was dead now. She’d gotten into a bind, where she’d had the choice of risking her own life or betraying Parker, and she’d chosen betrayal. When Parker had come looking for her afterwards, unsure in his own mind what he meant to do about it, she’d killed herself. Out of panic, probably, rather than remorse. But since her, since Lynn, there had been no woman, not for long. Never long enough for him and the woman to become individuals to one another.
Looking at it now, he could see where it had served as an answer to the problem of Lynn’s betrayal, but it was the kind of answer which—like drugs—required larger and larger application, led eventually to sloppiness and excess, became eventually as bad a problem as the one it was supposed to be solving.
Because Claire had come into his life in an odd way, entering in conjunction with a job, almost becoming part of the work at hand, she’d managed somehow to break through that pattern he’d developed. He found himself wanting to please her, willing to go out of his way for her sake, and though he’d been giving himself practical reasons to explain it—she could handle Billy, and so on—the truth was he acted that way because he wanted to.
What about when it was over, when the job was done? For the first time in several years, he didn’t know what would happen then. He might flee from Claire as he had fled from all the others. Or he might want her to stay with him for a while; a year, a month. Or he might want her to stay with him permanently. Right now he had no way to tell which it was going to be.
But he knew which one Billy wanted to hear, and the easiest way to keep Billy happy was to tell him what he wanted to hear. Still looking out at the street, Parker said, “When the caper’s over, I leave. By myself.”
“That’s what I figured,” Billy said, and Parker could hear the happy smile in his voice. Then Billy started walking around in the living room, behind Parker, and after a minute he said, “You know, Claire and me, we don’t—”
“Don’t start,” Parker said. He turned around and looked at Billy. “I don’t want your reminiscences.”
“Oh,” Billy said, and suddenly looked frightened, as though it had just occurred to him that it was possible for him to make some wrong move, say some wrong word, and Parker would change his mind and stay. He looked around the room, licked his lips, made vague arm movements, and at last said, “Well, I guess I better—” And hurried away to the kitchen.
Parker shook his head. He continued to drink his beer and look out the window, thinking about nothing at all, until the station wagon pulled into the driveway. Then he got his suitcase and went outside.
Claire had moved over, but Parker opened the passenger door and said, “You drive.”
“Okay,” she said, and slid back. When Parker was in and the door shut, she said, “Back to the hotel?”
“No. I checked out of there. We shouldn’t be seen around there anymore, none of us.”
“Where, then? Some other hotel?”
“Not good.”
She looked at him. “My place?”
“Your place,” he said.
Seven
THE MEETING was in Claire’s apartment, ten o’clock Tuesday evening. Claire and Parker were already there, and Billy arrived early, at nine-forty-five. Lempke and Mike Carlow showed up at ten on the dot, and Otto Mainzer came along five minutes later.
The apartment was on the third floor of a new building, all glass and chrome outside, all plasterboard and corner-cutting inside. There was a long living room with windows at one end overlooking an interior court, a small square bedroom with a narrow window overlooking an airshaft, and a midget kitchen and bathroom, windowless, sharing an air duct.
The furnishings showed a combination of taste and haste, the creation of a woman who wants good surroundings but doesn’t intend to stay in this particular location very long. Sofa, lamps, tables, drapes, all had discreet elegance and were quietly but obviously expensive, but there were gaps, empty spaces, almost as though someone had come through and removed every fourth item from the room. There were no paintings on the walls,
