The first explosion, muffled but unmistakable, broke into his calm and reflective mood, making him tense and nervous, and the second explosion made him far too jittery to sit still.
He knew he shouldn’t leave the truck. If something went wrong inside the museum, Formutesca and Manado would come out at a dead run expecting him to be in the truck ready to start the engine and get them away from there. But he couldn’t help it; he had to move. He had to get out and stand and move and walk around, even if only for a minute or two.
He left the pipe on the dashboard and stepped out on to the sidewalk. The air was damply cold with a chill that went straight to the bone, but he didn’t mind. It was too pleasant to stretch his legs, to move around.
He looked at the museum and noticed lights on now on the top floor. There seemed to be no signs of trouble, so he started to walk. He walked up toward Park Avenue halfway to the corner and was about to turn and go back, when he noticed the car parked across the street. Was that paleness in there a white face?
Maybe it was Parker come back after all to be sure things were going well. But no, it couldn’t be. That wasn’t the way Parker did things.
So who was it? Someone watching, intending to steal the diamonds once they were brought out of the building?
It was too much of a coincidence, someone’s waiting in a car on this block at this hour in the morning. It had to be somebody involved, somebody after the diamonds. Hoskins maybe, or one of Goma’s men.
Gonor turned away, acting as though he’d noticed nothing. He walked back toward the truck and then past it and on down to the corner. Then, hurrying, he crossed the street to the right and went down Lexington Avenue to Thirty-seventh Street and so around the block, coming at the car from behind. He moved cautiously on the dark street, his pistol in his hand now held against his side out of sight, and when he reached the car he was surprised to find it empty.
Had he made a mistake before? Had there been no one in the car at all?
He heard a tiny scraping sound behind him and spun, and someone standing there poked a hard finger into his stomach. He saw it was Hoskins, his face distorted with strain, and then the hard finger exploded in his stomach and he never knew anything again.
9
Hoskins stepped back quickly and watched Gonor fall against the side of the car and then crumple and drop to the ground. So it’s going to be bloodshed, is it? Hoskins thought, as though the decision had belonged to someone else but he had expected it. Waiting around, all this time, but knowing that sooner or later it would have to start.
After Walker had done that strong-arm business the other night, hanging him out the window, Hoskins had decided the time had come to play things a whole lot cagier. There were too many hard cases involved, and if Will Hoskins was going to come out of this with the boodle in hand and his head on his shoulders, it was obvious he was going to have to play a quiet and cautious game.
Quiet and cautious, that’s the ticket. Let the hard cases flex their muscles and push each other around. Old Will Hoskins, watching it all from the background, knowing a little bit more than any one of them about what all of them were up to, would know when to move in, when to make that one effective move that would bring him home the bacon and leave the strong-arm boys with egg on their faces.
For himself, Will Hoskins didn’t like the hard cases. Brawn instead of brains, violence instead of good planning. He didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t want to have anything to do with them. He’d avoided them all his life, and if this boodle weren’t so damned big he’d have avoided them this time as well.
Particularly after Walker had done that hanging-out-the-window trick. Marten and his playmates had acted rough and mean, but they didn’t hold a candle to Walker.
If that was his name, which Hoskins doubted. He was calling himself Lynch this time in town, and that was probably another flag. But whatever he called himself and whatever his real name, Hoskins wanted nothing to do with him. He was just as pleased, he told himself, that Walker wouldn’tcome in with him. He was better off playing a lone hand. He’d played a lone hand before, though never with strong-arm types involved.
Wilfred Hoskins had worked a lot of non-violent rackets in the course of his life, everything from hustling bridge on Long Island to roping for a wire store in Houston. He’d never turned down a chance to wangle a dollar in his life, and when that spade Gonor showed up with his burglary night-school idea, Hoskins immediately saw there was a way in there to promote for himself the sweetest piece of cake of his lifetime. And he still thought so.
He’d been keeping track of Walker since the window episode, keeping well out of Walker’s sight but keeping pretty close tabs on him just the same, and when he and Gonor spent almost an hour in that African museum this afternoon he’d told himself it had to mean something. They weren’t in that place for fun. When Walker and Gonor split after the museum, it was Walker that Hoskins followed back to his hotel. And then nothing happened for so long that Hoskins was about ready to call it a night, when there was Walker again, coming out of the elevator, coat on, Aaron Marten at his side.
It was nine o’clock. Hoskins watched the two of them, followed them from the hotel, saw them walk a block and a half and then go into a German restaurant on Forty-sixth Street, saw them sit down to dinner together, and then he knew all he needed to know.
First, Walker hadn’t wanted to throw in with Hoskins because he’d already thrown in with Marten and that crowd. Birds of a feather, of course. And no doubt Walker, a violent man himself, had been impressed by the tough manner of Marten and his friends.
But second, the more important, if Walker and Marten were meeting like this it could only mean one thing: that the robbery was set for tonight. And if the robbery was going to be tonight, after Walker and Gonor had spent this afternoon at that museum, then the museum was where the robbery would take place. That had to be where the Kasempa brothers were hiding out.
It all tied together. The only question was, what was Hoskins going to do about it?
In a way, he knew that what he should do about it was nothing. He should clear out of this affair right now; it wasn’t where he belonged. Walker, Marten, Gonor, the Kasempas they were all of them men of violence, and he was a man of reason. And they were all banded into groups; he was the only lone agent. If he were sensible, he’d go straight back to Los Angeles tonight.
But he couldn’t do it. There was too much money at stake; it was too great an opportunity. If he could bring it
