The Green Eagle Score

“I already did. She’s fine.”

Fusco went back into the kitchen, and Devers said to Parker, “Is this weird? I’m shacked up with a broad, she’s got a kid, her ex-husband is around the place as much as I am, I’m in on a goddam robbery with him, I’m paying for the broad’s analysis, I swear to God I never thought I’d get involved in anything this complicated in my life.”

“The robbery part is simple,” Parker told him. “We look it over, we see if it can be done, we work out the method, we do it, we split. We don’t let other things come in and make complications.”

“I follow you,” Devers said. “Don’t worry, Mis—sorry. Don’t worry, anyway. There won’t be any complications.”

Fusco came back in with the hamburgers, “I been listening,” he said. “You think it can be done, Parker?”

“Maybe.”

“But it looks good?” Fusco said.

“So far,” said Parker.

Part Two

1

”They’re going to do it,” Ellen said. “I know they’re going to do it now.” Shivering, she hugged herself and shook her head. “I thought it was just a dream for a long while, just a game they were playing. I thought my husband had learned his lesson, I thought he was too scared to try anything like that again. But it’s real, it’s going to happen, and this time he’s going to take Stan with him.”

Dr Godden said, “What makes you so sure?”

“The man who came today,” Ellen said. “The man my husband brought back with him from Puerto Rico.”

It was easy to talk to Dr Godden. She could fold her arms around herself an look at the intricate patterns in the Persian rug and tell him everything, everything that troubled her. She’d never been able to talk to anybody else like this, never in her life. Certainly not her parents, who listened only to judge, who were never anything in her life but judges, critical judges, prejudiced judges, hanging judges. And certainly not Marty Fusco, whom she now understood she’d married simply as an act of revolt against her parents and who had been no one to understand and help a person like her at all. There was no one, that was the bare fact of it, no one on earth to talk to, no one who would pay attention and try to see and understand and help. Until Dr Fred Godden.

It was the boy before Stan who’d first talked to her about going into analysis, and of course then she’d laughed at the idea, she’d thought analysis was for complicated neurotic people, movie stars and famous writers and society people and like that. Ordinary people like her didn’t go to psychoanalysts. But Bert—that was his name—did go to an analyst, because of deep-seated hidden fears that he was homosexual, and eventually he talked Ellen into going to Dr Godden, too. Not long after that, Bert moved to New York City, to Greenwich Village, to try to work out his problem down there, but by then Ellen had learned just how good analysis could be, and she’d kept on with it ever since.

It was Dr Godden who’d helped her get rid of all that leftover guilt she’d been carrying around, not even knowing it was there, weighing her down, making her do things that afterward she knew didn’t make any sense, things that only could wind up with her getting hurt again.

Because she’d wanted to get hurt, it was as simple as that. All the guilt her parents had saddled on to her, and then the guilt of feeling that she’d let Marty Fusco down, betrayed him, when she’d divorced him after he was sent away to prison.

But it had been the right thing to do. Because he hadn’t been the right man for her, he was only a symbol of a revolt that was now complete. She didn’t have to do symbolic things against her parents anymore, she was free of them now. So it was right to have divorced Marty, and that was the reason it was right and the real reason she’d done it, though at the time she’d told herself it was because of Pamela.

There was guilt there, too, guilt toward Pamela, feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence. It was all very confused still, very muddled and unclear, but they’d been working on it. hour by hour, three hour-long sessions a week, Monday and Wednesday and Friday, and they’d been getting closer and closer to the root of it all, and then this robbery business had come along, throwing everything out of kilter, and since then it seemed that was all she could ever talk about with Dr Godden.

Particularly in the last week, since Marty had found out where his so-called “organizer” was, at his ease between robberies down there in Puerto Rico, and Stan had offered to pay Marty’s plane fare down to talk to this man, this Parker, and bring him back. And now he was here, and it was real, and it was actually going to happen, and Ellen sat in Dr Godden’s office, hugging herself, staring at the complex patterns in the carpet, and felt the heaviness of inevitable disaster weighing down on her like a black raincloud. Because the man had come from Puerto Rico, and it was going to be done.

“Tell me about this man,” said Dr Godden. His voice, as always, was soft and gentle, but not at all dramatic like a hypnotist’s voice in the movies, the way she’d thought psychoanalysts’ voices sounded. And he didn’t have a beard, or an accent, or anything like that. He was just an ordinary man, perhaps forty-five , very well-dressed, balding, with a fringe of black hair over his ears and on the back of his head. He wore glasses with pale plastic rims, and he never took notes, and his eyes were unfailingly sympathetic behind his glasses, and if sometimes the hour went over a little he never rushed her, never complained, never cut her off.

She said in answer to his question, “His name is Parker. I don’t know what his first name, is, nobody said. I don’t like him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s—I don’t know, I look at him and I think he’s evil. But that isn’t right, exactly, I don’t think he’s evil. I mean, I don’t think he’d ever be cruel or anything like that, for the fun of it. I wouldn’t worry about leaving Pam around him, for instance. But—I know.”

“Yes?”

“He wouldn’t hurt Pam, but he wouldn’t care about her either. If something bad happened to her, he wouldn’t