Chicago, America’s Switzerland.
Who knew about this movement of so much valuable paper? Hundreds of people, all of them supposed to be trustworthy. Bank people, the security service that provided the guards, various federal agencies, and police forces along the way, that had to be told what was happening in their territory, as a courtesy and for practical reasons, too.
Ray had no idea who set up the job, but one of the gang was an old pal of his from Army days’, one of the boys he’d sent to Leavenworth, who was out now and had joined up with a much more serious bunch of heist artists. Old pal Phil had found his way to Ray Becker to tell him he was prepared to forgive and forget the old Army days because old pal Ray was going to feed old pal Phil the information on how the truck full of valuable paper was coming through; what time of what day on what road with what additional escort. And just to show there were no hard feelings, Ray’s share was going to be two hundred thousand dollars. A nice little nest egg. And just to show this was all in earnest, old pal Phil was handing old pal Ray a thousand dollars, ten new one-hundred-dollar bills, on account.
On account of that was all he was going to get.
The final fuckup. Make a four-million-dollar robbery possible, get one measly miserable thousand dollars out of it, and be the only one who gets caught and goes to jail for it.
Not this time. This time luck had been with him, for once. This time, he thought he’d been given the hundred forty thousand dollars that would help him clear out and start over under another identity somewhere else, but instead he’d been given Marshall Howell, and then Hilliard Cathman, and then Parker and the others, and then the gambling boat.
Spirit of the Hudson.Luck is with me at long last, Ray Becker thought. So maybe I’ll take a little of tonight’s money, some time soon, take a ride on that gambling boat, see what happens. Not all of it, for God’s sake, not even a lot of it, not to fuck up all over again. Take a couple thousand, that’s all, see if my luck holds. Win some money, meet some nice blonde woman in a long dress with her tits hanging out at the top, drink a glass of champagne. Buy a necktie before I go.
Across the way, the sun had ratcheted down out of sight. The sky over there was deep red above the jagged black masses of the Catskills, with blackness below, pierced by a few pinholes of yellow light. And here came the boat, the very boat itself, gliding down the river, just exudinglight. Spreading a pale halo out over the water and the air, a misty milky glow that made it look like a ship from some other universe, a mirage, floating into our plain dark world. Faintly, he could hear music, he could see people move around on the ship, the beautiful white boat surrounded by its veil of light.
And you’re coming for me,he thought, whether you know it or not. He smiled at the ship. In his mind, the blonde woman leaned toward him, and she smiled, too.
5
For Greg Manchester, it was almost like being a spy. Here he was, on the Spirit of the Hudson,anonymous with his tiny pocket Minolta camera and his even smaller palm-of-the-hand audio cassette recorder, snapping pictures here and there around the ship, murmuring observations and data into the recorder, and nobody at all had the first idea he was a reporter.
And the funny thing was, he didn’t even intend a negative story. It was just that the management of this ship, Avenue Resorts, based in Houston, Texas, was so antsy about the controversial nature of casino gambling that they demanded total control over every facet of any news story involving them, or they would withhold all cooperation.
It was easy for the management to enforce that policy with television newspeople, of course, because television newspeople necessarily travel with so much gear, cameras and recording equipment and lights and all the rest of it, that they need cooperation everywhere they go. But Greg Manchester worked in the world of print, a reporter with the Poughkeepsie Journal,a daily paper in the town that just happened to be the Spirit of the Hudson’ssouthern terminus, and Greg Manchester was determined to get a story that was notmade dull and bland and predictable by an excess of cooperation with Avenue Resorts.
His editor had been skeptical at first, since the Spirit of the Hudsonwas already an important advertiser, but Greg had said, ‘Jim, I’m not doing an expose. What’s to expose? They’re a clean operation. This will just be fun for the readers, to be a fly on the wall for one cruise of the glamorous ship.”
“No controversy,” Jim said.
“No controversy,” Greg promised.
Well, it was an easy promise to keep. With the Spirit of the Hudson,with so much official oversight and political grandstanding all around it, everything was absolutely squeaky clean, from the place settings to the morals of the crew. So what Greg was doing was essentially human interest, which quite naturally led him to the girl in the wheelchair.
Poor goddam thing, he wanted to hug her or something. She looked to be in her late twenties, the same as him, but so frail, so vulnerable, and yet so brave. If he wasn’t careful, she’d take over the piece, and he didn’t want that. She’d be in it, of course, a part of it, but the story still had to be about the ship.
So he limited himself in the early hours of the cruise to one brief conversation with the girl in the wheelchair and the rather tough-looking man in a chauffeur’s uniform who wheeled her around. They were out on the promenade deck at that time, watching the shoreline go by, and he went over just to make a little small talk lucky in the weather, beautiful scenery, that kind of thing, just to establish a connection and they were both gracious, but she was obviously very weak and not up to too much talk, so soon he moved on, looked at other things, took pictures here and there (a few of the wheelchair girl, too, of course, and he’d have to learn her name before the cruise was over), and made his observations into the recorder.
There was somebody else of interest aboard, too, a VIP of some sort, an ill-tempered kind of guy with a couple of bruisers who looked like they must be bodyguards, all being escorted around by Susan Cahill. He remembered Susan Cahill, though she’d have no reason to remember him, from the press conferences when the ship first arrived, when he’d just been a part of the herd of reporters all being schmoozed at once. Susan Cahill was sexy and smart and tough as nails, and Greg could see she was treating this short fat sour-looking man with the softest of kid gloves. Somebody important, at least to the Spirit of the Hudson.
He took pictures in the better dining room, on the port side of the ship, but actually ate in the sandwich joint on the other side, since he didn’t have an expense account for this little jaunt. He visited the casino but didn’t play, and noticed that the craps tables were the most popular (and the loudest) and the two roulette wheels the least. Six blackjack tables were open, three with a ten-dollar minimum and three with a twenty-five dollar minimum, and all did well. The rows of slot machines were almost all occupied almost all of the time, but the video poker games didn’t draw as big a crowd.
