could stumble on through life without him.
But there was one last session with her to be gone through. A little after three she came back into the living- room and sat down on the other end of the sofa. She was smoking, and she kept nervously tapping the cigarette on an ashtray.
She was going to say something, but she was taking her time. Parker waited, and finally she said, not looking at him, “What if something goes wrong?”
He turned his head and looked at her. She was studying the ashtray on the coffee table, tapping and tapping the cigarette against it. He said, “Like what?”
She made a convulsive shrugging movement. “I don’t know. Anything. The alarm goes out too soon. Somebody asks for identification at the wrong time. Anything at all.”
“We handle it, if we can,” he said.
“But it could happen.”
“It can always happen.”
“Maybe it’s the wrong kind of job,” she said.
He looked at her, waiting for her to go on. She sat there, tap-tapping, huddled in on herself, clasping her left upper arm with her right hand as though to hug herself, and although the fear of him seemed to be gone now— another change—the nervousness was even worse than before. She was like an old car with an engine that’s falling apart; you can just see the hood vibrating, but underneath there it’s throwing a rod.
When he kept on being silent, not responding to her comment about the wrong kind of job, she tossed him a quick look—her eyes were large and round and panic-stricken—stared back at the ashtray, and said, “Oh, not for you, maybe. Maybe you like this kind of thing. But maybe it’s wrong for Stan. Or even Marty. But mostly Stan.”
“It’s his choice,” Parker said.
“I wish he wasn’t involved.”
“Talk to him.”
“I did. A long time ago. The point is—” She stopped, shook her head, frowned at her cigarette, all as though she wasn’t entirely sure what the point was. Finally she said, “The point is, what happens to Stan if something goes wrong? He isn’t a professional, maybe he won’t be able to get away. And it would matter to him, don’t you see? Marty, it doesn’t matter to Marty, he goes to jail, he comes back out, he does the exact same thing again. Jake Kengle was in jail, too, it’s the same thing. But Stan isn’t like that. It would matter to him, if he was in jail.”
Parker wondered how she could believe there was anyone on earth to whom a jail term didn’t matter. But what he said was, “Maybe Stan thinks he won’t go to jail.”
“I know. It’s worth the risk, everybody’s sure it’s worth the risk.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Why don’t you—?”
She stopped again, shook her head violently, finally took a drag on the cigarette. With one last tap at the ashtray, she rose in a cloud of expelled smoke.
Parker said, “Why don’t we what?”
“Nothing,” she said, turning away.
“Why don’t we call it off?”
She shook her head and walked out of the living-room. He knew that’s what she’d been about to say, that while starting to say it the impossibility of it all had come through to her—the costumes were in the closet, the guns in the kid’s room, the bus out at the lodge, the string assembled and playing poker in the next room—and she’d stopped herself before saying the whole thing. But it was what she wanted, that much was obvious. To have it not happen, never be going to happen.
It wasn’t the first time Parker had seen somebody’s woman get that kind of last-minute jitters, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. It was good to have a woman like Claire, strong enough and secure enough and smart enough to stay out of it entirely. It would be good to get back to San Juan, to see Claire again, to relax beside the ocean, to spend some time in the casino.
Parker didn’t go to the casino for himself, but for Claire. She did the gambling, if it could be called that.
The casinos in San Juan didn’t have the desperate greedy urgency of Las Vegas, where the gambling rooms have neither clocks nor windows to remind the fish of the passing of time. In San Juan the casinos were merely entertainment appendages of the tourist industry, along with the beaches and the floor shows and the boat rides to St Thomas for duty-free liquor. The hotel casinos were only open eight hours a day, from eight in the evening till four in the morning, and only three kinds of gambling were available for the idle speculator: roulette, blackjack, craps.
Claire’s specialty was craps. She invariably, upon entering the casino, bought fifty one-dollar chips and headed for whichever crap table was the least crowded. There she would spend her fifty chips one at a time, exclusively on side bets, always passing the dice when they came around to her, and winning about one time in three. She was the most passive of gamblers, but the action exhilarated her, so that as the stack of fifty dwindled slowly away her eyes always got brighter, her movements more electric, her expressions more excited. Every time, she would turn away from the table after the loss of the final chip as vibrant and exuberant as if she’d just broken the bank. Gambling was like a good alcohol high with her, it made her enjoy life more, enjoy herself more. Afterward, they always went from the casino straight back to the hotel and to bed, where she would be at her most inventive and eager.
Yes. It would be good to get back to San Juan, good to see Claire again.
It surprised him a little that his thoughts were becoming sexual. That was another change Claire was making in him. The way it used to be, sex was always an urgent, vital, all-consuming thing with him right after a heist, slowly then tapering off until he had no interest along that line at all, and that’s when he would be ready for another job. But now, because of Claire, it was different. Here he was, the day of the heist itself, his mind full of pictures of Claire on white sheets in the semi-dark air-conditioned room in San Juan, the sun bright outside the windows, all
