Parker 09 The Split (4 page)

She came in now and shut the door, saying, 'Little Bob Negli's here. You want to talk to him?' She was still bone-thin, which once had been her main selling point. Her white hair was harsh-looking and brittle, chopped short in an Italian cut. Curved black lines had been drawn on her face where the eyebrows had been plucked, and her long curving fingernails were painted scarlet, but she wore no lipstick; her mouth was a pale scar in a thin, deeply lined face.

She always dressed young, in bright sweaters and stretch pants, with dangling Navaho earrings and jangling charm bracelets. Inside the young clothing was an old body, but inside the old body was a young woman. Madge would hold onto 1920 until the day she died; she'd never had a better year and wasn't likely to.

Now she said, 'Little Bob's in my room behind the office. You want to go there, or have him come here, or what?'

'I'll go there.'

'I'll fix drinks,' she said.

Parker didn't want drinks, but he said nothing. Madge had to turn everything into a party. Every day was old home week.

They left Parker's room and walked down the sidewalk in front of the units toward the office. 'It's good to have the old bunch around,' Madge was saying, and told him who'd been here last month, and two months ago, and six months ago. This was the one thing Parker couldn't take about her, her gossiping. She never opened her mouth to the wrong people, but she never shut it with insiders. Parker walked along beside her now and let her chatter wash off him like rain.

They went into the office, where Ethel was sitting at the desk. Ethel was about twenty-five, mentally retarded, Madge's cleaning girl and general assistant. Madge told her, 'I'll be in back with the boys,' and she nodded without saying anything.

Little Bob Negli was sitting on the green leatherette sofa in the back room, smoking a cigar half as tall as him. He was a shrimp: four feet eleven and one-half inches tall. He had the little man's cockiness, standing and moving like the bantamweight champion of the world, chomping dollar cigars, wearing clothes as fancy as he could find, sporting a pompadour in his black hair that damn near brought his height up to normal. He looked like something that had been shrunk and preserved in the nineteenth century.

He got to his feet when Madge and Parker walked in and frowned up at Parker' as though he had a really tough decision to make and the civilised world hung on his answer. He said to Madge, 'That's really Parker?'

'It really is,' she said. 'He traded one sour puss for another. Wait'll you spend five minutes with him, you'll see. He hasn't changed a bit, still the same old Cheery Charlie, life of the party.'

Parker said, 'Maybe Bob wants to talk business.'

Madge grinned. 'See what I mean? What do you want to drink, Parker?'

'Nothing.'

'Maybe that's your trouble. Bob, you want a refill, just holler.'

'Will do, Madge.'

She went out, and Negli said, 'I wouldn't call it an improvement exactly.'

'That's enough about the face,' Parker told him. He pulled a foam-rubber chair over in front of the sofa and sat down.

Negli stayed on his feet a few seconds longer. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind about something, maybe whether he should be insulted or not. But then he sat down arid said, 'Business, then. You interested in a score?'

'That depends.'

'On what?'

'The take, the risk, and who I'm supposed to be working with.'

'Of course. That's to be expected. But if the take is good and the risk is low and the people are known to you, you're interested?'

Parker nodded.

'All right.' Negli put the long cigar in his mouth and talked around it. 'The take,' he said, 'is between a hundred and a hundred fifty G. The risk is practically nil. The people, so far, are Dan Kifka and Arnie Feccio and me.'

'So far,' Parker echoed. 'How many you figure all told?'

'The details aren't all worked out yet. We figure six or seven.'

'That's a big string.'

Negli shrugged. 'We want risk low, we got to have enough men.'

That's fifteen to twenty G a man, depending on how much and how many.'

'Sure. Figure fifteen minimum.'

'What's the job?'

'Gate receipts. College football gate receipts.'

Parker frowned. 'How do you figure low risk?'

'It all depends on the plan. We've already got a way in, and we ought to be able to make some kind of advantage out of the traffic jam after the game. There's always a traffic jam after a football game.'

'All you've got,' Parker said, 'is a way in and an itch.'

'You ever hear a job start with more?'

'It better have more before it's worked.'

'So come in and see Dan; you know where he lives. He'll give you everything we got.'

'Anybody asking ace shares?'

'No. Equal divvy, share and share alike.'

Parker considered, and then nodded. 'I'll come in and talk,' he said. 'I don't promise any more than that.'

'Of course not.' Negli got to his feet, the cigar at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth. 'You'll like this operation,' he said. 'It's neat and clean. And profitable.'

They left the room, and out in the office Madge said, 'Done so soon? Slick around, we'll talk, it's a slow night.'

'Got to be going, Madge,' Negli said. 'Wish I could stay, but that's how it is.' To Parker he said, 'Tomorrow night, nine o'clock.'

'I'll be there.'

Madge started talking again, urging them to stay and that. Parker assumed she was talking to Negli instead of him, and went straight back to his room. He switched the television on without the sound, left the room lights off, and lay on the bed to watch and think.

Sometimes there was an advantage in doing a job in the middle of a crowd, and if Negli and Kifka actually did have a way into this stadium, there was no reason why they couldn't figure a way out again. It all depended on the details.

The next night, at nine, he was in Kifka's apartment. There was no cheerleader there that time. Instead, there was Little Bob Negli and Arnie Feccio. Feccio was a florid moustachioed type with a beer-barrel torso and oily black hair. He looked more Greek than Italian, and whichever nationality he looked he had to be a restaurant owner. He'd tried to substantiate his looks a few times, but his restaurants always went broke and he always had to go back to his regular profession to get himself out of debt.

The four of them sat around a table in Kifka's living room, and Kifka, with the help of maps and diagrams, told Parker what they had:

'It's Monequois Stadium, just outside town on Western Avenue. Monequois's one of them hoity-toity Ivy League colleges, nothing but money, and this is their new stadium. Saturday, the sixteenth of November, is their big game against Plainfield, the big deal for the whole-season. And the nice thing, it's what they call inter-conference - it don't count in their regular season, they play in different conferences.'

Parker said, 'What makes that nice?'

'The gate receipts are different,' Kifka told him. 'It ain't a regular season game, so the gate receipts go to some charity or fund or something, and season tickets don't count. Also, no mail orders, no advance sales at all. It's a big deal, see what I mean? Like the World Series. The box office opens at six in the morning the day of the game, and there's always these clowns that stay up all night to buy the first tickets.'

Little Bob Negli said, 'You see the beauty, Parker? Except for student tickets, student passes, whatever they call them, every seat in the house is paid for cash on the barrelhead the day of the game. And all that cash has to be right there in the stadium when the game starts.'

Parker nodded. 'So it's a big score,' he said. 'If we can get at it.'

'We can get at it.' Kifka spread out a diagram on the table, facing so Parker could see it best. 'This is the stadium. They got three box offices where they sell tickets, North Gate, East Gate, and South Gate. These squares here with the X's in them. About once an hour the cash is collected and brought around to the stadium building here at the west end of the stadium. All your offices and locker rooms and everything are in this building. Now, your finance office is on the second floor, and that's where the money's delivered.'

Parker said, 'How?'

'Armed guards in pairs. They walk it along a corridor under the stands. They wouldn't be that tough to hit, but they never carry more than a couple grand at a time anyway.'

Parker nodded.

'Now,' Kifka said, 'in the finance office the cash is counted and stacked and banded and put in money boxes to go to the bank. They get it done by the time the last quarter is starting so the armored car can get out of there before the traffic jam starts. The armored car doesn't come till they phone for it, so it isn't there very long, just long enough to fill up and take off. It's bracketed by municipal police in riot cars all the way to the bank. The bank has a special deal where it has people down there even though it's Saturday, and the money goes in and gets checked all over again right away.'

Parker said, 'What sort of guard in the finance office?'

'You got four armed men in there, private police, plus six employees. The way in, you pass through a locked guarded door into a corridor and along the corridor is the finance office. You knock there and they check you with a peephole before they open up.'

Parker nodded. 'What about the size of it? It's going to he mostly small bills.'

Arnie Feccio answered, saying, 'We figure two big suitcases ought to do it.'

'That's a lot of weight.'

Negli smiled and said, 'We don't want to have to run with it anyway, Parker.'

Parker said, 'We'll see.' To Kifka he said, 'I understand you've got a way in.'

'A beauty,' Kifka told him. 'A natural.'

'Let's hear it.'

'We go in on Friday.' He stopped and grinned at Parker, waiting for Parker to do cartwheels. When Parker just sat there and looked at him, Kifka belatedly went on with it: 'We go in Friday afternoon,' he said. 'We get into the finance office then and we spend the night there. Saturday we collar every employee the minute he walks through the door. We're on top of the situation from the beginning. The cash is brought in; we have the employees stow it right in our suitcases.'

Feccio said, 'What do you think, Parker?'

'I don't know yet. How do you get in?'

'At the entrances,' Kifka told him, 'they got these ornamental gates, you know? With the spear points on top and all that jazz. So they don't quite reach to the top of the entranceway. I can get Bob up high enough, and he can squeeze through.'

'Like an eel,' said Negli. He demonstrated by wriggling his hand through the air.

'There's doors here and there in the wall,' said Kifka, 'besides the gates themselves. They're kept locked, but you can unlock them easy from inside.'

'What if somebody sees you and Bob at the gate?'

Kifka grinned. 'Early birds. First ones on line at the North Gate. We got this all worked out, Parker, believe me. The South Gate is where the newspaper photographers always take the pictures of the nuts, and the East Gate is right on the main drag, so we do it around at the North Gate. Monequois Park is across the road there, and if anybody drives by what are they going to see?'

'All right. Then what?'

'We got three locks to get through and we're in the finance office. Then we wait till morning.'

Negli said, 'It's good, Parker, you know it is. It's worth your time coming here.'

''If it plays like Dan says it does, and if there's a way out.'

Kifka said, 'So what do you want to do?'

'Is there anything doing out to the stadium tonight or tomorrow morning?'

'Middle of the week? Nothing.'

'Then we do a run-through,' Parker said. 'Tonight. We want lock impressions anyway, so we can move faster when the time comes.'

'Good idea.'

They ran it through later that night, and it worked just as Kifka had said it would. Negli went over the North Gate and a minute later let the other three through a green door in the brick wall about ten paces away to the left. They were under the grandstand in a kind of concrete tunnel. Lighting their way with flashlights, they followed the tunnel around to the right and came out in the basement of the stadium building, next to a metal staircase. They went up two flights and Arnie Feccio worked silently and speedily on a locked door. There was no alarm system here, and no guards inside the stadium at night, although private police did patrol the general area by car.

Kifka led the way past the first locked door to the second, which led onto the corridor to the finance office. Feccio got them through this door, too, and then through the third, and they were in the finance office.

The finance office was actually three offices separated by room dividers of wood and glass, plus a small closed-off workroom containing supplies and a mimeograph machine.

They looked the place over, decided the workroom would be the place to spend the night when the time came, and retraced their steps, Feccio taking the time to study the locks as they went so they'd have keys when they came back.

Outside in the car, Kifka said, 'Well? How does it look?'

'We can get in,' Parker said.

Kifka nodded. 'Right. And the question is, can we get out? Right?'

'That's right.'

'If we can get in, we can get out. We'll have to work on it.'

'Tomorrow,' Parker said. 'It's been a long day. I need a place to stay while I'm here.'

'With a woman or without?'

Parker hesitated, then said, 'With.' Not that he expected to want her, not just yet. Before a job he never had any interest in women, or in anything else but the job itself. But he would want her afterwards, when he would make up for lost time.

Kifka had gotten him Ellie. Not exactly a pro, hardly an amateur. She wasn't sharing her place with anybody at the moment and she didn't mind sharing with Parker so long as he came with an introduction from somebody she knew and was willing to pay for the groceries and incidentals. She seemed surprised when Parker let her know the first night that nothing was expected just yet, but she didn't seem to care one way or the other.