excitement could be made to last.
Carrie leaned on him as they walked. “I’m glad I found you.” It was as though she had sensed what he was thinking and wanted to make him feel better.
Affection was an opening. “What’s your name?”
“I haven’t named myself yet.”
“Your parents gave you the name Melisande?”
“Melisande Carroway Carr. If they had an excuse, they must have told me when I was too young to remember.”
“When you wrote down your name and number for me, why did you use that one?”
“Balance.”
“Balance because I told you my real name?”
“No. Because you already saw and touched everything about me, but didn’t know anything.”
As they approached her car, she took the keys out of her purse and handed them to Jeff. He looked to both sides, up and down the street, and back toward the alley behind the restaurant. “What are you doing?”
He said, “We just pulled out a lot of cash to pay in there. Sometimes it attracts attention.”
She laughed. “From people like us.”
He opened the car door for her and then went around to the driver’s side, started the car, and drove toward the freeway entrance.
They were on the freeway for thirty seconds before she said, “I want to pull a robbery.”
He felt a sudden tightness in his stomach. “I just finished eating the biggest meal I ever had in my life.”
“It doesn’t have to be right now. It’s not even eleven o’clock. We can wait around until we feel less full.”
“Don’t we have enough money after last night?”
“If we do something tonight, we’ll have even more money. And who’s going to expect us to go out again two nights in a row?”
“But why take the risk?”
“That’s why. The risk is what I love. You can have the money.”
He glanced at her and brought back with him a picture of her beautiful face, the big brown eyes gleaming in excited anticipation. She looked absolutely crazy, but he could feel the beginning of an erection. He shifted in his seat. “I’ll think about it.”
“Not too long. If you don’t want to, I’ll have to drop you off and find someone else to go with me.”
17
MANCO KAPAK WAS in Wash, his dance club on Hollywood Boulevard. He found the place much more alien than his two strip clubs in the Valley. He leaned on the wall behind the bar just to be out of the crowd for a bit and squinted his eyes to see through the dark and the flashes of light.
Wash looked as prosperous as he needed it to. The dance floor was full, and all the bodies merged into one mass compelled by the same sound, looking from his vantage point like the sea, with waves of movement sweeping across it and back. The tables on the far side of the big room were more than full, often with a girl sitting on a lap, or two of them sitting on one chair. The bartenders near him were pouring drinks as fast as they could.
The lights in Wash were throwing a reddish cast over everyone right now, and it gradually changed to yellow, then green, then blue. Laser beams swept across the room far above at the fourteen-foot level, thin green lines of light intersecting to make a moving web ceiling.
The whole spectacle was mesmerizing—the lights and music and the young men and women stepping, turning, gyrating to one beat. Kapak looked beyond the long bar at a group of girls dancing together in the crowd, and they reminded him of the girls in Budapest so long ago—faces with that fresh, smooth look, the long, shining hair, the bodies so perfect. He felt a sudden emptiness, a terrible longing to go back that was so strong that he could feel a film of moisture forming in his eyes. He blinked it away. The place he missed so much wasn’t Budapest. It wasn’t a place at all. It was being young.
He squared his shoulders, opened the hinged section of the bar, and began to walk. He made his way around the edge of the dance floor, patrolling the building, making sure every waitress, every bouncer, every busboy saw him. In all of these years in America, he had learned plenty of management secrets. One of them was showing up and displaying interest. All most employees needed to know was that the boss was paying attention. They could forgive the owner for being rich, because they could see for themselves that the price of getting rich was getting old. But if the boss didn’t care about the business, he didn’t care about them either. And they’d make him pay for it, punish him by stealing and being lazy.
Kapak made a second circuit around the cavernous club. Once he was sure everyone had seen him, he could go inside to the office where the music was shut out. He unlocked the thick, padded door in the back wall, went inside, and closed it. The anteroom he entered held a bank of television monitors above a control desk and an unoccupied table and chairs. At the control desk staring at the monitors was the club’s security manager, a retired cop named Colby. He picked up a hand radio and said, “Bobby, take a walk over to the bar and get a look at the tall guy with the mustache and the wife-beater shirt. He looks like he’s thinking of starting a fight.” Then he set it down again.
Kapak said, “Hello, Colby.”
Colby only nodded and said, “Mr. Kapak.” His manner was slightly cooler than it must have been when he had pulled speeders over in the old days. Kapak liked it, because it seemed to him to indicate a kind of integrity. Colby had spent twenty years watching people like Kapak very closely, and he hadn’t liked them. Now that he was left with an inadequate pension and had to work for one of them, he didn’t pretend he had changed his mind. He spoke to Kapak with the respectful formality that cops used to speak with people they considered enemies.
Kapak passed through the door at the other side of the room into the inner office, where Ruben Salinas, the manager of Wash, was expecting him. As soon as the door was closed, even the muffled beat of the music in the club was almost undetectable. Salinas stood up and came around his desk. He was young, and he dressed like his customers in tight designer jeans and a T-shirt, but he had the dead eyes of a fifty-year-old business executive. “Nice to see you, Mr. Kapak. Everything all right out there?”
Kapak was aware that it wasn’t especially nice to see him, but said, “Nice to see you too, Ruben. Everything seems fine. I’m pleased.”
“Thank you.”
“Have we heard from our friend yet?”
“I just saw two of Rogoso’s girls come in the front door on the monitor. It should only be a minute or two.” He pointed at the monitor mounted on the wall where he could see it from behind the desk.
Kapak stepped up beside him and turned to look where he was pointing. There were two young women with long, straight black hair, short skirts, sandals, and tank tops like all of the two hundred other female customers. They both had big leather purses with the straps over their left shoulders and clutched under their left arms. Kapak was happy with them. If Salinas had not pointed them out, he would never have seen any difference between them and the others. He watched them make their way across the crowded dance floor, sidestepping or turning to avoid dancers as they came. Their movements had a graceful, playful quality, as though they were dancing their way through the crowd, half-unconsciously giving in to the rhythm, even though the world knew that there was nothing unconscious about the way twenty-year-old girls looked.
They reached the line for the ladies’ room, stood watching the dancers and the lights and appraising the men who had noticed them and had not looked away. Kapak saw the other girl now, the blond who worked for Salinas. She moved in close to them, and he could see she had a purse that was identical to the purse one of Rogoso’s girls carried. They leaned in close and talked for a few seconds, and then she turned and stepped away from them.
“Something’s up,” Salinas said.
“What?”
“She’s supposed to switch purses with the taller one in the ladies’ room, and bring the purse in here. She’s coming in, but I didn’t see a switch.”
They waited, watching the monitor. The two girls waiting in line for the bathroom went in.
There was a knock on the office door, and Salinas stepped to open it and let the blond woman inside.
