Read The Score: A Parker Novel Online
Authors: Richard Stark
The Score: A Parker Novel
RICHARD STARK
With a New Foreword by John Banville
The University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
© 1964 by Richard Stark
Foreword © 2009 by John Banville
All rights reserved.
Originally published by Pocket Books; later reprinted by Coronet Books
under the title
Killtown
. Reprinted in 2001 by Mysterious Press under the
title
The Score
.
University of Chicago Press edition 2009
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77104-5 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-77104-0 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stark, Richard, 1933–
The score / Richard Stark ; with a new foreword by John Banville.
p. cm.
Summary: The fifth Parker novel has the main character planning a score that involves a dozen professional crooks ready to take over a rich, remote North Dakota town.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77104-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-77104-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Parker (Fictitious character).
I. Banville, John. II. Title.
PS3573.E9S36 2009
813′.54—dc22
2008042344
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
eISBN: 9780226772936
John Banville
It was in the 1960s that Richard Stark began writing his masterly series of Parker novels—at last count there were twenty-four of them—but they are as unrepresentative of the Age of Aquarius as it is possible to be. Try imagining this most hardened of hard-boiled criminals in a tie-dyed shirt and velvet bell-bottoms. Parker does not do drugs, having no interest in expanding his mind or deepening his sensibilities; he cares nothing for politics and is indifferent to foreign wars, although he fought or at least took part in one of them; he would rather make money than love and would be willing to give peace a chance provided he could sneak round the back of the love-in and rob everybody's unattended stuff. When he goes to San Francisco it is not to leave his heart there—has Parker got a heart?—but to retrieve some money the Outfit owes him and kill a lot of people in the process.
The appeal of the conventional crime novel is the sense of completion it offers. Life is a mess—we do not remember being born, and death, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wisely observed, is not an experience in life, so that all we have is a chaotic middle, bristling with loose ends, in which nothing is ever properly over and done with. It could be said, of course, that all fiction of whatever genre offers a beginning, middle, and end—even
Finnegans Wake
has a shape—but crime fiction does it best of all. No matter how unlikely the cast of suspects or how baffling the strew of clues in an Agatha Christie whodunit or a Robert Ludlum thriller, we know with a certainty not afforded by real life that when the murderer is unmasked or the conspiracy foiled, everything will click into place, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself before our eyes. The Parker books, however, take it as a given that if something can go wrong, it will, and that since something always can go wrong, it invariably does.
Indeed, this is how very many of the Parker stories begin, with things going or gone disastrously awry. And Parker is at his most inventive when at his most desperate.
We first encountered Parker in
The Hunter
, published in 1962. His creator, Donald Westlake, was already an established writer—he adopted the pen name Richard Stark because, as he said in a recent interview, “When you're first in love, you want to do it all the time,” and in the early days he was writing so much and so often that he feared the Westlake market would soon become glutted.
Born in 1933, Westlake is indeed a protean writer and, like Parker, the complete professional. Besides crime novels, he has written short stories, comedies, science fiction, and screenplays—his tough, elegant screenplay for
The Grifters
, adapted from a Jim Thompson novel, was
nominated for an Academy Award. Surely the finest movie he wrote, however, is
Point Blank
, a noir masterpiece based on the first Parker novel,
The Hunter
, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin. Anyone who saw the film will consider Marvin the quintessential Parker, though Westlake has said that when he first created his relentless hero—hero?—he imagined him looking more like Jack Palance.
In that first book,
The Hunter
, Parker was a rough diamond—“I'd done nothing to make him easy for the reader,” says Westlake, “no small talk, no quirks, no pets”—and looked like a classic pulp fiction hoodlum:
He was big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short…. His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. (p. 3—4)
Even before the end of this short book, however, we see Westlake/Stark begin to cut and burnish his brand-new creation, giving him facets and sharp angles and flashes of a hard, inner fire. He has been betrayed by his best friend and shot by his wife, and now he is owed money by the Outfit—the Mafia, we assume—and he is not going to stop until he has been repaid:
Momentum kept him rolling. He wasn't sure himself any more how much was a tough front to impress the organization and how much was
himself. He knew he was hard, he knew that he worried less about emotion than other people. But he'd never enjoyed the idea of a killing…. It was momentum, that was all. Eighteen years in one business, doing one or two clean fast simple operations a year, living relaxed and easy in the resort hotels the rest of the time with a woman he liked, and then all of a sudden it all got twisted around. The woman was gone, the pattern was gone, the relaxation was gone, the clean swiftness was gone. (p. 171)
The fact is, though Parker himself would be contemptuous of the notion, he is the perfection of that existential man whose earliest models we met in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. If Parker has ever read Goethe—and perhaps he has?—he will have recognized his own natural motto in Faust's heaven-defying declaration: “
Im Anfang war die Tat
” [In the beginning was the deed]. Donald Westlake puts it in more homely terms when he says that, “I've always believed the books are really about a workman at work, doing the work to the best of his ability,” and when in the context of Parker he refers to “Hemingway's judgment on people, that the competent guy does it on his own and the incompetents lean on each other.”
In Parker's world there is no law, unless it is the law of the quick and the merciless against the dim and the slow. The police never appear, or if they do they are always too late to stop Parker doing what he is intent on doing. Only twice has he been caught and—briefly—jailed, once after the betrayal by his wife and Mal Resnick, which sets
The Hunter
in vengeful motion, and another time in the recent
Breakout
. Parker treats the law-abiding world, that tame world where most of us live, with tight-lipped impatience or, when one or other
of us is unfortunate enough to stumble into his path and hinder him, with lethal efficiency. Significantly, it is the
idea
of a killing that he has never enjoyed; this is not to say that he would enjoy the killing itself, but that he regards the necessity of murder as a waste of essential energies, energies that would be better employed elsewhere.
Violence in the Parker books is always quick and clean and all the more shocking in its swiftness and cleanliness. In one of the books—it would be a spoiler to specify which—Parker forces a young man to dig a hole in the dirt floor of a cellar in search of something buried there, and when the thing has been found, the scene closes with a brief, bald line informing us that Parker shot the young fellow and buried him in the hole he had dug. In another story, Parker and one of his crew tie a hoodlum to a chair and torture some vital information out of him, after which they lock him in a closet, still chair-bound, and depart, indifferent to the fact that no one knows where the hoodlum is and so there will be no one to free him.
With the exception of the likes of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and Georges Simenon—that is, the Simenon not of the Maigret books but of what he called his
romans durs
, his hard novels—all crime writers are sentimentalists at heart, even, or especially, when they are at their bloodiest. In conventional tales of murder, mayhem, and the fight for right, what the reader is offered is escape, if only into the dream of a world where men are men and women love them for it, where crooks are crooks and easily identified by the scars on their faces and the Glocks in their fists, where policemen are dull but honest and usually dealing with a bad divorce, where a good man is feared by the lawless and respected by the law-abiding: in short, where life is otherwise and better. In the Parker books, how-
ever, it is the sense of awful and immediate reality that makes them so startling, so unsettling, and so convincing.
As the series goes on, Parker has become more intricate in motivation and more polished in manner—his woman, Claire, the replacement for his wife Lynn, the one who shot him and subsequently committed suicide, is a fascinating creation, forbearing, loving, nurturing, the perfect companion for a professional—yet in more than forty years his creator has never allowed him to weaken or to mellow. The most recent caper,
Dirty Money
, published in 2008, ends with a vintage exchange between Parker, a woman, and a grifter who was foolish enough to try pulling a fast one on Parker:
He helped McWhitney to lie back on the bed, then said to Sandra, “If we do this right, you can get me to Claire's place by two in the morning.”
“What a good person I am,” she said.
“If you leave me here,” the guy on the floor said, “he'll kill me tomorrow morning.”
Parker looked at him. “So you've still got tonight,” he said.
And that is about as much as Parker, or Richard Stark, is ever willing to allow to anyone.
NE
W
hen the bellboy left, Parker went over to the house phone and made his call. He gave the operator downstairs the number he wanted, and waited while the phone clicked and ticked and snicked in his ear. He was feeling impatient, and he was about to go downstairs and put in the call from a pay phone when all the clicking finally quit and a ringing sound started instead.
Parker counted the rings, just as Paulus was doing at the other end, and while he waited and counted he looked around at the room. It was just a hotel room, the same as any. Because it was in Jersey City, it might be a little grimier than most, that's all.
On the eighth ring, the nosy operator came on, saying, “Your party doesn't seem to be answering, sir.”
“He moves slow,” Parker told her. “Let it ring.”
“Yes, sir.”
He tensed and relaxed his shoulder muscles, hunching and relaxing, hunching and relaxing. He'd flown up, and being in a plane always made his shoulders stiff. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Sixteen. Where the hell was he?
The ringing stopped, just before seventeen, and a voice said, “Hello?” The voice sounded wary. Paulus had always been a damn fool.
“Hello,” said Parker. “I'm here.”
“Oh. You made good time.”
There was nothing to say to that. Parker waited.
Paulus cleared his throat, and said, “Come on over.”
“Now?”
“Sure. We're all here. You got the address?”
If he said no, Paulus would sure as hell give it to him over the phone. Wary one second, big-mouthed the next. He said, “I've got it.”
“Fine.”
“I'll want to change first. I just got in.”
“Anytime.”
Parker hung up, shook his head, and lit a cigarette. Paulus would die in jail; it had to happen. He was a good organizer, a good tactician, but he moved through the world like a movie spy, screaming for some cop to look at him twice.
Parker unpacked his suitcase, stripped, took a shower, put on fresh clothes, and left the hotel. Downstairs, he bought a city map at the tobacco counter and sat in one of the leatherette chairs to find his route. Cabdrivers keep a log, so he didn't want to take a cab.
He found Fourth Street, found the block the address should be on, and traced it out from where he was. It was maybe twelve blocks at the most, so he could walk it. If it had been farther away, he would have walked a couple of blocks and then taken a cab to within a few blocks of the address. This way was even better.
He tucked the map in his inside jacket pocket, left the lobby, and started walking. He walked four blocks. Halfway down the fifth block he realized he'd made a wrong turn. He turned around and started back. A guy who'd just come around the corner looked startled, hesitated, made his face blank, and came on. They passed each other, the guy looking straight ahead. Parker had seen that face before, in the hotel lobby.
Fine. Well, it was nice to know before getting into the operation too deep. Paulus had been overdue for years, and this was the time.
Except the guy hadn't looked like law. He was undersized. Most police departments have a height requirement, to boost their self-confidence. And he'd been dressed like a bum, in work pants and brown leather jacket, and wore on his face the gray, pinched look of the loser. He didn't look like law at all.
Parker hesitated at the corner, not looking back. The simplest thing would be to go to the hotel, pack, check out, go to Newark Airport, call Paulus from a pay phone there to warn him, and take the next plane to Miami. If the guy had looked even a little bit like law, that's what Parker would
have done. But this way, it was a problem. Before he could know what to do, he'd have to find out what the guy was.
He turned right and started walking again. He'd heard the sound of a train whistle a while ago, one of those diesel blasts, from over in this direction.
The neighborhood went from rundown to nonexistent. Warehouses of brick, boarded-up storefronts, empty lots with paths angled across them. A diner, closed for the night though it was only a little after ten.
Turning corners, Parker had a chance to glance back without being obvious about it. The guy was keeping not quite a block away, walking with his hands in his pockets, trying to look like somebody strolling along with no place in particular to go.
Ahead, a car was coming this way, slowly, the first one in five minutes. It slowed when it reached Parker, and Parker frowned at it, trying to figure. None of this made any sense. He took a quick look back. The guy was still maintaining his block distance, so he and the car had no connection.
Then Parker saw the occupants of the car and relaxed. A guy in his twenties driving, girl of the same age beside him, two little girls standing up on the backseat, looking out the rear window. The car stopped, and the driver stuck his head out the window to say, “Excuse me. Can you tell me how to get to the Holland Tunnel?”
Parker shook his head. “Sorry. I'm a stranger here myself.”
“Well, can you tell me how to get the hell out of
here
?” He
waved his arms to include the whole neighborhood and looked a little desperate.
Parker thought of the city map in his pocket, but he'd need that later, and he didn't want to waste a lot of time with these people. He pointed the way he'd come, saying, “I think if you go that way you'll come to someplace where there's people.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“Sure.”
The car pulled away, and Parker started walking again, first checking the guy, who had slowed down but was still less than half a block back by now. Parker walked at the same speed as before, and the guy gradually fell back to his normal distance.
There wouldn't be a better neighborhood. One car in five minutes, and that guy here only because he was lost. A diner that's closed by ten o'clock at night. No residences of any kind, no twenty-four-hour plants.
In the next block, there were two long warehouses with a loading space between them in near-darkness. Parker passed it without looking in, went down to the corner, turned right, waited a second, and came right back around again.
This time the guy covered it better. He slowed a bit, but that was all.
Parker walked faster than before, timing it. It would work out fine. They'd pass each other right opposite the loading area.
As they passed, Parker on the outside, Parker turned on his left foot and drove a right hand across the side of the guy's
jaw. It turned him, threw him off balance, and sent him flailing forward into the loading area to wind up in the shadows there on his hands and knees.
Parker went in after him, to ask him questions and be sure he was getting the right answers. It shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.
But it wouldn't work that way. There was a clicking sound, and the guy came up with a knife. He didn't waste any time, just lunged.
Parker had no weapons on him but his hands. They were big hands, to go with the rest of him. He moved to the left to limit the guy's knife-arc, pretended a left-hand grab for the knife, and stepped in fast, bringing the edge of his hand in under the guy's jaw.
There wouldn't be any more air going through that throat. The knife fell, and then the guy fell.
Parker had moved as a result of training. Counterattack should be at least as strong as attack. If someone wants to hit you, you hit him. If someone wants to rough you up, you rough him up. If someone wants to kill you, you kill him.
But now, belatedly, he wished he'd pulled that swipe a little. He couldn't get any answers now. The clown shouldn't have reached for a knife.
Parker went through his pockets. Cigarettes, matches, comb, small package of Kleenex, inhaler, unopened box of contraceptives, key chain with three keys on it including one to a General Motors car, nail clipper, wallet. The wallet contained seven dollars in bills, two photos of girls, an unemployment
insurance check, and a driver's license. The check and license were both made out to Edward Owen, and the driver's license gave Owen an address in Jersey City.
He hadn't been law, but Parker already knew that. What he'd been, he still didn't know. He put the wallet in his own pocket; maybe Paulus would know. Then he left and walked down to the next intersection and looked at the street signs. There was a streetlight there; under it Parker opened his city map and found out where he was and how to get where he was going.
It was six blocks before he saw anybody at all.