Mainzer felt sudden embarrassment and anger, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He felt his face grow red inside the mask, making it impossible for him to take it off yet. “I will,” he said stiffly, trying to hide both the embarrassment and the anger. “Don’t worry about me.”
Lempke came back through the hole with Billy, who was white with terror and stumbling over his own feet. Billy stood just inside the drape, looking around big-eyed, and whispered, “Where are they?”
“We chopped them up,” Mainzer said, feeling a surge of contempt for this soft fool, “and put the pieces in suitcases.”
Parker said, “Let’s get started. Billy, where’s the chart?”
Billy had to fumble around in pockets, but he finally did come up with the chart and they went to work. Billy and Lempke packed, Parker carried the full cases through the wall to the tour office, and Mainzer brought them downstairs to Carlow, who stowed them away in the truck.
Mainzer didn’t remove the mask until he was out of the ballroom, just before making his first trip to the street. In the darkness of the tour office he tugged the mask off and shoved it into a pocket. He could feel his face still flaming red, but in the darkness it might go unnoticed.
He kept thinking of things he should have said to Parker, things he still could say. Every trip up and down the stairs his mind was full of cutting remarks, clever answers, tough challenges; he mouthed them as he went along, glowering.
From time to time he would run into Parker in the tour office, the both of them arriving there simultaneously, Parker with more filled cases, Mainzer empty-handed, and every time he was on the verge of saying something, just at the edge of making an issue, but it never quite happened. He told himself it was better not to start anything now. They were working on a tight schedule, too tight for anything extraneous. Afterwards they could have it out, just the two of them. Parker was too much of a hard-nose, he was going around looking for a broken head, and, Mainzer figured, he might be just the boy to give it to him, one way or another.
At the other end of his route was Carlow, and there too a tight-lipped truce was in effect. The truce had more violent overtones here, though, because both of them were aware of its existence. Mainzer and Carlow spoke to one another only when it was absolutely necessary, and then in the fewest possible number of syllables. Driving downtown together in the truck they hadn’t said a word to one another, and both knew they were only waiting for the job to be finished before they got down to their private disagreement.
What the disagreement was neither of them particularly knew or cared. “They rubbed each other the wrong way, they were enemies, they were waiting for the communal task to be finished and then they would be at each other’s throats—that was all they knew and all they had to know.
Mainzer was not entirely honoring this truce, finding small, indirect ways to irritate Carlow. Like the placement of the coin cases; it would have been just as easy, and more sensible, for him to put them on the tailgate when bringing them out to the truck, but instead he ostentatiously put them down in the street directly behind the truck, leaving the smaller and lighter Carlow the job of lifting them up and putting them inside. He did this the first three trips downstairs, but on the fourth trip Carlow was already in the truck, way back in the darkness at the end, and when Mainzer put the cases down in the street Carlow called, with heavy sarcasm, “In here, Tarzan.”
Mainzer smiled thinly, “Sure thing, pal,” he said, picked one of the cases up, set it on the truck bed, and gave it a hard push toward Carlow, trying to knock him off his feet with it. Carlow jumped to the side, the case thudded into the ones already stacked in place, and Carlow put his hand inside his overall pocket saying, “Send the other one that way, buster.”
“Whatever you want, pal,” Mainzer said, but he pushed the second case in more gently than the first, and after that he put the cases inside the truck instead of outside.
It was on his way up after his fifth trip that he ran into Parker’s bitch, also on the way in. Claire, her name was, and he had to admit she was a good-looking piece. But probably frigid.
The educated ones with the cool good looks and the clothes right out of the fashion magazines, they were the frigid ones, nine times out of ten. The only ones that wanted it were the dumb fatties, and they were the ones that Mainzer had no taste for. Because of this, he very rarely had any sort of relations with a woman, and when he did have anything going it was always short-lived, the woman invariably turning out to be either dumb or frigid. He didn’t know why that was so, or how other men got around the problem, but on the other hand he didn’t care a hell of a lot either. They were better things to do with the male body than laying it on some woman. The big times in his life had mostly happened at night, but never in bed.
Like stomping Carlow, for instance. He was going to enjoy that. And Parker, too. In fact, with Parker he’d enjoy it even more, because it would be tougher to work out.
In any case, Mainzer wasn’t primarily a ladies’ man. Still, he had an image to maintain and a view of life to re- confirm, which was why he’d greeted Claire on first meeting her with a bluntly phrased suggestion, and why, on running into her again at the office building doorway now, he said, “Change your mind yet, honey?”
She gave him a look of cool contempt—which he knew to be phony—and went on ahead of him into the building. He followed her up the stairs, watching the way her hips moved. He thought of other things he might say to her, but he kept silent. He also thought briefly of grabbing her in the hallway, giving her a quickie in payment for that look of contempt, but he put that idea out of his mind right away. He’d tried something like that once, years ago when he was younger and thought all women wanted it, thought frigidity was always a fake, thought all you had to do was climb aboard and they’d sigh, “Oh, yes, I do want it!” Instead of which, he’d suddenly found his arms full of grizzly bear. That little bitch had been the worst, dirtiest, most vicious and violent fighter he’d ever come up against in his life. She bit, clawed, scratched, kicked, gouged, butted, kneed, elbowed and generally tried to rip his skin off. He’d finally had to knock her out, in self-defense, and he never did get into her pants, though when he’d looked at her lying there on that floor unconscious he’d had half a mind to go ahead and do it anyway. The thought that she might wake up halfway through had stopped him.
And the memory of her had stopped him on every similar occasion since then, including now. He followed Claire on into the Diablo Tours office, and when she bent to go through the hole in the wall the only desire he had was to kick her for a field goal.
Until Claire’s arrival, things had been slow for Mainzer, with pauses after every trip while he waited for two more cases to be gotten ready, but now that Claire was helping pack it went faster, and Mainzer moved constantly back and forth between tour office and truck. In the ballroom, he knew, Lempke and Claire and Billy were all packing the coin cases, while Parker sometimes packed and sometimes carried the full cases out of the office.
Mainzer kept track, and by ten minutes to three he had made twenty-seven round trips. With two cases each time, that meant fifty-four cases of coins already stowed in the truck. Going into the building for the twenty-eighth time, about to start up the stairs, Mainzer sensed movement in the darkness behind him, and turned. The piece of pipe glanced off the side of his head and pounded onto his shoulder, bringing blinding pain. He made a sound high in
