Abruptly he shrugged and stepped back and said, “Come in then.”
She went past him into the darkened room, and he shut the door. In the dark her disembodied voice said, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”
“I can concentrate this way,” he said. “You just talk, I’ll listen.”
“I can’t see anything,” she complained.
He walked past her, knowing where the bed was, and stretched out on it. “You don’t have to see,” he said. “Just talk.”
“Why do you have to pressure me like this?”
“You came here,” he reminded her.
In the next silence he could hear her taking out her pride and looking at it and deciding it wasn’t worth the gesture and putting it away in a box till some time when she could tie the score. When next she spoke, her voice was level and flat and emotionless: “Where do I find a chair?”
“To your left, and back.”
She found it without stumbling into anything, and waited till she was seated before lighting a match and putting it to a cigarette. Looking at her in the small yellow light, he felt the first surge of specific desire for this individual woman. He looked up at the ceiling and watched the shadows there until the match went out.
She said, “It’s nine days from now, in this hotel.”
“They must have scraped out Lempke’s skull, up there in the big house.”
“Why?”
“He’s forgotten everything he ever knew. You and Lebatard, you’re amateurs, but Lempke should know.”
“What should he know?”
“Number one, you don’t meet in the town where you’re going to make the hit. Number two, you don’t stay in the hotel where you’re going to make the hit. Number three, you don’t take a job on consignment; we’re in the wrong business to take your Billy to court if he doesn’t pay.”
“You can kill him.”
“How much does that make me?”
“I mean, Billy won’t try to cheat you because he’s afraid of you. All of you. He knows if he doesn’t pay, you’ll kill him.”
There was nothing to say to that, so Parker simply closed his eyes and waited.
After a minute, she said, “I know there’s a certain amount of risk in this, but there’s risk in it every time, isn’t there?”
When she kept waiting for an answer, he said, “Don’t put those silences in, I’ll go to sleep.”
“Well, isn’t there risk all the time?”
“You’re here to tell me, not ask me.”
“All right. My husband was a pilot with Transocean. Billy is his sister’s husband’s brother. When my husband was killed, Billy started hanging around. I told him no, but he keeps saying he just wants to be my friend, he wants to help me. I need a lot of money, and I told him so, and he said he’d get it for me.”
Parker said, “You told him you wouldn’t give, but you would sell.”
“If he wants to take it that way, it isn’t my fault. He said he wanted to help, and I knew what I needed, and I told him. He’s done this kind of thing before, you know. Hire people to steal from other coin dealers. Except for the really rare ones, coins arc absolutely untraceable.”
“You need more than he can get from a simple dealer heist?”
“I need seventy thousand dollars.”
“Seventy grand. That’s friendship.”
“What I do is my business.”
“Right. And what I don’t do is mine.”
There was a pause, and then she said, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry. I know how it sounds, but I do what I have to do.”
“Take off your clothes.”
The silence this time had sharp edges on it, and so did her voice when she said, “That’s your price?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll get someone else.”
He let her reach the door, and then he said, “Your line was,’ I do what I have to do.’ But that’s a lie, you wear your pride like it’d keep the cold out. What you mean is, you despise Lebatard and don’t care what you do to him.”
She shut the door again, bringing back the darkness. She said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Another rule,” he said. “Don’t work with anyone you can’t trust or don’t respect.”
“You have too many rules,” she said.
