West of the Holland Tunnel, the Turnpike Extension rides high over the Jersey flats, where garbage and construction debris and used Broadway sets and failed mobsters have been buried for a hundred years. Arthur drove, with Parker and Rafe behind him on the backseat. Rafe had nothing to say until Arthur took one of the steep twisty ramps down from the Extension into the industrial wasteland of the flats. Then, not looking at Parker, he said “I’d like to live through this.”
“Everybody would,” Parker said
Take me home–to Bayonne
To the place–that I call home!
Jersey City!–By the turnpike–
Underneath–Exit 14-G!
Mark Russell, parodying John Denver, and getting the exit number wrong, but the aggrieved writer of that linked Times article got his lyric wrong, so they’re even.
Writers of crime fiction often stake out a patch of home turf to write about. Dashiell Hammett had San Francisco, where he did most of his writing. Raymond Chandler had L.A., and so did his prolific emulator, Ross MacDonald (though his gumshoe avoided competition from Mr. Marlowe by sticking to the ‘burbs) San Diego had Wade Miller (the writing team of Bob Wade and Bill Miller), who dreamed up the melancholy loser Max Thursday to solve its sun-drenched mysteries.
At the other end of the country, David Goodis, who spent a short time in L.A. himself, was never more at home when writing about his native Philadelphia and its environs, though I don’t think Philadelphians of the time necessarily appreciated the way he wrote about it (many do now, which only goes to prove that even the seamiest scenarios can seem romantic in retrospect).
Jim Thompson got around some, but his best books tend to be out there in the dry dusty southwestern states he grew up in, some panhandle or other. John D. MacDonald more or less invented the Florida crime novel, followed by the likes of Hiaasen and (in the final years of a strange peripatetic life) Willeford. Chicago, by comparison, has a perplexing paucity of first-rate crime fiction, but it got Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, and that ain’t nothing (honestly, I haven’t read the books, so I don’t have an opinion).
Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes, expatriates both, took different paths in their long European exiles–writing out of France and Switzerland, Highsmith transplanted New York bred Tom Ripley to the French countryside, while her one-shots mainly stayed in New York. Himes, a Parisian by way of Missouri, dreaming of the country that had rejected him as a writer and a man, turned the metropolitan microcosm that is Harlem (which he spent a rather short period of his life in) into his own personal Dublin, ala James Joyce. (Needless to say, there’s crime writers for Dublin as well, and plenty of real crime there to keep them busy).
But when they weren’t working their own patch, most of them wrote about New York. When it comes to crime, New York is nobody’s turf, because it’s everybody’s turf. One writer proved the exception to that rule, made New York (city, state, and half of New Jersey into the bargain), uniquely his own, to the point where they became not merely settings for a story, but dramatis personae in themselves. Give you one guess. Well, actually, you’d need at least three. The reluctant detective agency of Westlake, Coe, and Stark.
Westlake didn’t like to confine himself too much to his patch, but he was always somehow more sure-footed when negotiating it. Spending a few weeks in a different part of the country, or some sultry tropic clime may give a writer all kinds of ideas for stories, but it doesn’t give him/her that deep familiarity with the terrain that comes from spending the better part of a lifetime there. You gotta know the territory, if you want to make it work for you.
I doubt Westlake spent all that much time in Florida, a state he never seemed to like very much (a big club, that includes a fair few longtime residents, but the winters are nice, and not everybody there is crazy). And the section of it he’d have felt the least affinity for would have been Palm Beach, primary setting of Flashfire. And that is certainly one reason Flashfire is a bit of a misfire.
But Firebreak, by comparison, is set primarily in Manhattan and North New Jersey (with a quick nod to the wintry upstate region Westlake was raised in). He concludes the story in Montana, but for such a relatively unpeopled part of the state, the need for extreme familiarity with the landscape and its denizens isn’t really there. He could have done a fair bit of his research for that part of the book with the Delorme State Atlas and Gazeteer for Montana, and no one would be the wiser. (Plus he would have loved that it still calls itself a ‘Gazetteer’, whatever that means. And is still printed on paper, though they’re diversifying into GPS now.)
Because Parker doesn’t like to work too close to home, his settling down with Claire in Sussex County made it harder to justify him pulling heists in and around nearby Gotham, but the main action of this book isn’t actually heist-related, and he’s really got no choice but to attend to business in both Bayonne NJ and Greenwich Village NY. Two more disparate communities could rarely be found in such close proximity to each other (maybe six miles as the crow flies). And yet Parker’s visit to the former leads inevitably to his grim descent upon the latter. One of the charms of this book. Which I’d better get back to now.
Having gotten involved in the plan to steal dot.com mogul Paxton Marino’s stolen collection of famous art from his grandiose hunting lodge in Montana, along with series perennials Frank Elkins and Ralph Wiss, Parker has discovered that their new recruit, disgraced uber-nerd Larry Lloyd, has accidentally identified Parker’s home address to old enemy (and nerdy in his own right) Paul Brock, who promptly dispatched a Russian hitman to that location, only to have the hitter be dispatched by Parker instead. I feel fairly confident that sentence will never be typed again.
Parker has learned there’s a surveillance device in the currently vacant house in New Jersey, but to find whoever is using it, he needs a specialist. Lloyd is elected. Parker is reserving judgment on whether he goes on living after this job is over, but his digital acumen is necessary for the heist, and in the meantime he might as well help clean up the mess he created with Brock and (presumably) Brock’s larcenous lover, Matt Rosenstein.
To track down the base the hidden camera is broadcasting to, Lloyd will need some equipment from his house, just outside Springfield, MA. Parker drops him off there, and drives off in Larry’s car, planning to swing around and pick him up. A paranoid with very real enemies, Larry has his house wired for sound, and the car can pick up the audio of a conversation he’s having with some people who clearly aren’t supposed to be there and are leaning on him hard.
Parker figures the same people who sent the Russian after him sent these people after Lloyd, because they can’t find Parker. Now does Parker give a damn what happens to Larry Lloyd? No, but these people are grilling him about the Montana job. Even if he doesn’t tell them anything crucial, and even if they don’t kill him (which would kill the job), he’ll be so mentally crushed by the third degree that he won’t be useful to anybody afterwards. Parker to the rescue once again.
Parker breaks into the house just before a weeping Larry spills everything he knows. He shoots one man in the knee, and the other jumps through a closed window to escape. Parker’s all ready to do the old “you can dish it out but you can’t take it” routine, to find out how much these people know about him, but in a humiliation-fueled rage, Lloyd shoots the remaining hood in the head with his own gun. It’s not like Parker didn’t already know about the Mr. Lloyd’s self-control issues. But this nerd-on-the-bend’s chances of living to spend his share of the loot just got significantly worse.
Parker calms him down by asking him a sobering question–does he want to leave his current life on parole and go on the lam, or does he want to dispose of the body and stay put? Larry’s not ready to be out in the wind yet, so he opts for the latter–Parker tells him how to go about getting rid of the stiff, and leaves him to it, while he takes a little nap.
It’s not often we learn anything at all about Parker’s sleeping habits. After almost 40 years, we still don’t even know what he dreams at night, or if. And we’re not going to find out this time either.
It wasn’t real sleep, but something close, learned a long time ago, a way to rest the body and the brain, a kind of trance, awareness of the outer world sheathed in unawareness. The dim room remained, shades drawn over both windows, the gray-canvas-covered synthesizer in which Lloyd kept his computer equipment not so much concealed as reconfigured, the shelves and cabinets, the close door, the framed color photographs of machines, the small occasional sounds from outside the room, and the cot, narrow, with a thin mattress covered by a Canadian wool blanket in broad bands of gray and green and black that held him like a cupped hand. Inside it, farther within it, there was nothing except the small bubbles of awareness that surfaced and surfaced and found nothing wrong.
Call it sleep mode, if you like. Power-save? Mind you, this type of half-waking dormancy was around a long time before electronics. If you have a dog or cat, you’re well familiar. Can’t say I’ve ever met a human who’d mastered it. Wish I could.
Mr. Lloyd does okay with the corpse disposal, a point in his favor. He thanks Parker for the help, and Parker doesn’t want thanks, of course. He wants to go back to Colliver Pond and find out who’s watching the house. Lloyd takes very little time to pinpoint the source–another unoccupied vacation cottage, a short distance off. Not wanting to seem unneighborly, they go pay their respects.
It’s a double set-up. The people the Russian worked for, Cosmopolitan Beverages (a legit business fronting for all kinds of illegal activities), sent a semi-retired former employee of theirs (strictly smalltime stuff), named Arthur Hembridge, to watch the monitor linked to the camera in Claire’s house. If he sees a man matching Parker’s description (“A big man, hard and shaggy, with brown flat hair”–Stark tended to alternate between making Parker’s hair brown and black, and I’ve never been quite sure what he meant by ‘shaggy’), he calls a number to report.
What he doesn’t know is that calling that number generates a signal that will automatically trigger a bomb in the house he’s watching. What he also doesn’t know is that he and his wife blow up at the same time, removing all possible witnesses, and avoiding the need to pay him for his services. Cute, huh? Arthur is most amused, as you can imagine.
So after they clear up a little misunderstanding with Arthur’s wife (she panics when she wakes up and hears voices in the other room, runs to the other house, and very nearly calls that number herself before Arthur stops her), Arthur agrees to accompany Parker on a little investigation into the inner workings of Cosmopolitan Beverages. Parker knows what he’s up against here–another version of The Outfit. He knows how you deal with people like that. Make them bleed. They always have more soft spots than they think.
Lloyd will stay behind, clean up all the explosives and such. Parker and Hembridge head for a building on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, which is where Arthur’s former colleague Rafe Hargetty works–his successor there, the ‘friend’ who sent him on a suicide mission. Arthur is a bit sore about this, you know. He was a good organization man, always did what he was told, never talked out of school. He’s sort of feeling like Cosmopolitan’s retirement package isn’t all it was cracked up to be. We’ve all been there, or will be in future. One way or another. Never trust a boss.
Parker plays a variation on the game he played in the early books. Climb the ladder, from one underling to the next, until you reach the top. He leans hard on Rafe, who folds like the proverbial cheap suit. Once Parker has the address where they can find Rafe’s boss, in Bayonne, they head over there. They drop a relieved Rafe off along the way, in the midst of the industrial wasteland, far from the nearest phone, with no shoes or socks. I’m sure he turned up eventually.
Ah, Bayonne. You know, it’s not really such a bad little town. Some parts are downright livable. They’re not going to any of those parts.
It’s called the Port of New York, but years ago most of the shipping businesses moved across the harbor to New Jersey, where the costs were lower and the regulations lighter: Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and Bayonne are, along their waterfronts, a great sweeping tangle of piers, warehouses, gasoline storage tower, snaking rail lines, cranes, semi-tractor trailers, chain-link fences, guard shacks, and forklift trucks. Day and night, lights glare from the tops of tall poles and the corners of warehouses. Cargo ships ease up the channels and into the piers every hour of every day from every port in the world. The big trucks roll eastward from the Turnpike and the cargo planes lift off from Newark International. The thousand thousand businesses here cover every need and every want known to man.
Gentrify that, yuppies.
The receptionist at Cosmopolitan, a well-mannered young black man, is rather perturbed to have actual visitors to receive out here in the wilderness–normally he just sits there, more or less as window-dressing. Parker identifies himself as Rafe Hargetty, and asks to see Frank Meany. It works. Down comes Rafe’s boss, with two goons. He’s just a better-dressed goon himself. Too good a physical description to skim past. And we’ll be seeing this one again a few books from now.
He was tall and bulky, with a bruiser’s round head of close-cropped hair that fists would slide off. He’d been dressed very carefully by a tailor, in a dark gray suit, plus pale blue dress shirt and pink-and-gold figured tie, to make him look less like a thug and more like a businessman, and it might have done a better job if the tailor’d been able to do something about that thick-jawed small-eyed face as well. The four heavy rings he wore, two on each hand, were not for decoration. He had a flat-footed walk, like a boxer coming out of his corner at the start of the round.
So this is the capo del tutti capo, right? Wrong. Just another flunky, who may have been genuinely tough once, but has been sitting behind a desk too long, wearing tailored suits. Clothes sometimes unmake the man. Standing next to him is the thug who got away at Larry Lloyd’s house, bandaged, still bearing the marks of having gone through that window, and very unhappy at seeing Parker instead of Rafe–he reaches for his holster.
All Parker’s got is a small-caliber Beretta he took from the dead thug (the one Larry killed him with). Not enough range and power for this situation, but just drawing it makes Meany nervous (flying bullets don’t discriminate) and he suggests they go back to the office and talk.
Parker’s never really the chatty type. As soon as they get to the office, bunched closed together, he kills the hood with the bandages, and takes his .32 revolver. He has Arthur take the guns from the other two. Then he says he’s going to shoot Meany in the spine, paralyze him for life, if he doesn’t arrange for Parker to talk with his boss–not just a higher-up–one of the owners. There’s five of them. Meany only knows one, named Joseph Albert.
See, Meany is more than willing to call the hit on Parker off, just a misunderstanding, let bygones be bygones. Brock does little things for them like debugging their offices so the Feds can’t listen in, plus he can make neat gizmos like remote-controlled bombs, so they did him a solid in return. They gave him Viktor Charov’s number, so Charov could do a little freelance job for Brock. But then Charov disappeared and they knew Parker must have made that happen, so it got personal, and they tried to do the job themselves. Mistake. They know that now.
But Parker isn’t buying that. Meany isn’t the boss of anything, he’s just an employee, a soldier, so he can’t call it off. Best way to make Cosmopolitan’s king realize going after Parker is a poor business decision is to start sacrificing pawns–like Meany. Make him the message. Keep killing soldiers until the generals are ready to make peace. Meany, eager to discourage this line of strategic thinking, agrees to get Mr. Albert on the phone, stat.
The conversation has to be somewhat encoded, in case Brock missed some of the taps on their phones. But Albert gets the gist. He can put an end to any further attempts on Parker’s life, and tell Parker where Brock is. Or Parker shoots Meany, and comes after him next.
Albert doesn’t sound like he’s easily intimidated. But even if Albert doesn’t think Parker could get to him–like he just got to Meany, and Hargetty before that, and a very professional Russian hitman before that–he knows what would follow would be unpleasant, and noisy, and when things get noisy, cops get nosy. They can always find another nerd-on-the-bend (more of those in Russia than hired killers these days). Brock is expendable. He agrees to Parker’s terms. Meany relaxes. Parker gets the address.
414 Bleecker. The Village. Brock didn’t run far. He and Rosenstein used to share an apartment at the fictional address of 8 Downing Street, and now he owns a fictional townhouse that would be maybe a brisk ten minute walk from the former address, a mere block away from the seriously overrated Magnolia Bakery (come check out the long line of suckers sometime), were 414 Bleecker not in fact the site of a large municipal playground. Mr. Stark giving us a rare glimpse of his droll side.
Part 2 ends with Arthur Hembridge dropping Parker off in Manhattan, just after they exit the Holland Tunnel. Arthur seems oddly crestfallen Parker doesn’t require his services anymore. It’s almost a Handy McKay moment, but Arthur isn’t nearly so handy, and while they both had a score to settle with Cosmopolitan, Parker needs to settle with Brock and Rosenstein alone.
“I was getting used to going places with you,” Arthur says. “Now you’re retired again,” Parker responds, and sets off for 414 Bleecker. On the way, he phones Lloyd, says to tell the others he’ll have finished with his personal business soon, and he’ll see them in Montana. But the first chapter of Part 3 opens in a very different (though no less scenic) locale.
Horace Griffith, art dealer to the rich and famous, is in Geneva negotiating over the sale of a Titian when he gets a call from longtime client Paxton Marino, who wants to meet. No need for him to come to New York, where Marino is now; Marino will jet over to Northern Italy, meet Griffith at his chalet in Courmayeur. Griffith readily agrees to make the three hour drive, since obscenely rich and obsessively acquisitive people like Marino are, after all, his bread and butter.
Griffith didn’t actually believe in ghosts, and yet he was always among them. He traded mostly in European paintings and sculpture, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and most of the creators of those works had firmly believed in an unseen world, in spirits, in an often vengeful and occasionally merciful God. They’d painted saints and sinners, martyrs and miracles, and Griffith had steeped himself in their work.
He had also, in the darker side of his profession, showed himself to be at one with the world those artists had described. He, too, was merely human, full of error. He didn’t really believe in all that cosmic moral accounting, but he couldn’t help some faint awareness in the back of his mind that, if retribution ever did fall on him, he’d damn well deserve it.
Every dealer in valuable art, at a certain upper level of market worth, is offered the temptation now and again. To deal, in almost absolute safety, with stolen work, or forged work. Griffith at times envied those who had never fallen, but he also knew he could not possibly live as well, as comfortably, if he had been one of the virtuous ones. If virtue truly is its own reward, then Griffith regretfully had to go where the rewards were more palpable.
He’s the one who arranged for Marino to buy all those stolen paintings, and even arranged for some of them to be stolen in the first place. And now he needs to arrange to unload some of them. Because the sad truth is, he’s broke. In the manner that only the very wealthy ever can be broke. Property rich. Cash poor.
“That’s all it is,” Marino insisted, turning his glower at last full on Griffith. Still standing there in all that Alpine light, he looked like a later Roman Emperor, lesser and more effete, but still both powerful and dangerous. “I have a cash-flow problem,” he said. “It’s temporary. I’m projected to be out of it in less than eighteen months, probably under a year. But the problem is, if I’m seen to cut back anywhere, it will be taken as a sign.”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s where the self-fulfilling prophecy comes in,” Marino said. “With the hyenas. With the schadenfreude.”
If he stops spending at his current rate, if he starts selling off houses, planes, other fungible assets, the scavengers of the marketplace will close in and rip him to shreds. But if he merely sells off things nobody knows he has, because he’s not allowed to have them, they’ll just assume he had more cash at hand than expected, and seek another wounded wildebeest at a different watering hole.
The attempted theft of Marino’s lodge in Montana that started this whole narrative unfolding; which Griffith had not known about, and the potential implications of which chills him to his very marrow, has made Marino aware that he needs to move all of that stolen artwork out of his cunningly concealed basement gallery there.
This is what he wants Griffith to do for him, tout de suite–and then to pick out three or four masterworks, and negotiate with museums and/or insurance companies as if he’s representing the thieves who stole them (which of course he is). The rest can be restored to their unlawful owner once he’s set up a new secret gallery to gloat over. (Geez, man, you’re a nerd, not an aesthete. Couldn’t you just collect old Spider-man comics or something? Oh yeah, that reminds me. Still very topical, this book.)
Chapter 2, in this very traditionally Starkian multi-POV Part 3, shows us Pam Saugherty coming out of the D’Agostino supermarket at 790 Greenwich (which closed recently, but seems to be open again–no, you didn’t ask, I’m just trying to be current–rents are so damn high in the Village now, it’s getting hard for anybody to stay in business). She’s headed for 414 Bleecker, where she is, in effect, the housekeeper. On the way there, she bumps into Parker, who is too focused on his objectives to notice her, but she recognizes him, and it brings back memories, none of them pleasant.
Okay, the last time we saw Pam, her pleasant suburban home in Philadelphia had been invaded by Messrs. Rosenstein and Brock, the former of whom had beaten her husband Ed to death for not letting him rape her (and then raped her anyway). After a brief bloody engagement with Parker, both men were critically wounded, incapable of defending themselves, and Parker, not caring if they lived or died, left them to her tender mercies. Which seem to have been more tender than Parker could have ever imagined. Pam, what happened?
After Parker untied her, she had every intention of hurting Matt Rosenstein, torturing him, making him pay for what he’d done to her and her family. Then calling the cops, once she’d gotten back some of her own. But Paul Brock called to her from the basement Parker had left him lying in, unable to move. Imploring her to help them. Help Matt. Help the man who used her like a blow-up doll, only with less empathy. But who is still the only person in this world Paul Brock has ever loved.
He’s offering to support her and her three children, even send them to school, everything, anything, if she’ll call a doctor he knows, the kind who can be discreet. She is oddly moved by his devotion, and uncomfortably aware that with her husband dead, her economic prospects are extremely poor. Rosenstein can’t ever hurt her again–Parker’s bullet severed his spine, he’s probably going to die anyway. She agreed to call Brock’s doctor. And here she is, an unspecified number of years later, still looking after them.
(Sidebar–there is a bit of a timeline clue here–we’re told her oldest child was ten at the time of the home invasion, and all of them are in college now. Well over ten years have passed from her perspective. A lot less than the 30+ years that have passed from our perspective. Time warp.)
Rosenstein didn’t die, but if Brock’s love had been less possessive, less needy, he would have let his sociopathic sweetie go. It was impossible for a man like that to adapt to life in a wheelchair, reinvent himself–he liked himself the way he was, even if nobody else other than Brock did. No life of the mind, only of the body, and the body has been wrecked beyond repair, leaving only a shell of the predator he once was.
Predator? No, that’s the wrong word. To call Matt Rosenstein an animal would be doing a disservice to animals, predatory or not. The worst person ever to appear in a Parker novel. Even Otto Mainzer was a pro compared to him. And this is his hell, to which he has been consigned, not for his many evil deeds, but for being incapable of self-knowledge. Or love–even for the one person who has single-mindedly devoted himself to Rosenstein’s welfare. Another way in which love and life resemble each other.
Pam tells them about seeing Parker at dinner, and Rosenstein’s response is along the lines of I Told You So, even though he obviously wanted Parker dead, and just as obviously could never do the job himself. Brock is terrified, remembers that look Parker gets in his eyes when he’s hunting all too well, but holds himself together somehow. Rosenstein can afford the luxury of self-pitying rage. Brock has to find a way to shore up their defenses for the assault that is surely coming.
He was hoping that if Parker was dead, Matt could let go of his anger, which was foolish, but understandable. He goes out at night sometimes, to slake the needs Matt can’t satisfy anymore, but that’s just sex. He should have just put Matt in a private hospital and walked away, but he can’t do that. Just like he can’t run now, when he knows he should. He can’t let Parker finish the job he started years ago, even though that would be merciful at this point. Anyway, Parker would keep coming after him, after Rosenstein was dead. He’d never stop looking over his shoulder. He’s not a strong man, never was, but in his own quiet way, he’s got more guts than his lover ever did.
He tells Pam to go to Florida or somewhere, he’ll call her when it’s over–unless it’s really over, in which case there’ll be no call. One somehow assumes he remembered her in his will. Fellow caretakers, they understand each other very well, formed a sort of tenuous friendship, but that’s coming to an end now.
He nails the inner door of the townhouse shut. He seals off the roof entrance. He’s got a gun–Matt wants one too, but he’s afraid of what he might do with it, in his growing panic, knowing the wolf is closing in, stuck in that chair, telling himself that if he could just walk again, he could deal with Parker himself (like you did before, Mr. Rosenstein?). He hears footsteps on the roof. “He’s here,” Paul thinks.
And then a few chapters that have nothing to do with Parker, Brock, and Rosenstein. Stark can be sadistic sometimes. Let’s skip over them fast. We meet Bert Hayes, an investigator working for a the Art Identification Department of the Secret Service, in charge of art theft. (I can’t find any evidence this department exists, but I wouldn’t be surprised–they do a lot more than just try to keep VIP’s from being shot).
He’s very suspicious of Paxton Marino. An early report of the theft at the lodge in Montana mentioned some valuable old paintings–then later reports left that out (because local cops were bought off). He talked to Marino about it directly, and let’s just say rich people probably never do learn much about diplomacy. Well, I guess we all know that now, huh? He’s going to nail this guy if it’s the last thing he does. And he just found out about a bunch of crates suitable for shipping paintings are coming to the lodge, along with a certain art dealer.
And then we’re with Larry Lloyd again. He’s found out his old business partner, Brad Grenholz–you know, the one that cheated him, who he then tried to murder, and they both ended up in prison, that guy–is getting out of prison, a lot sooner than he’d expected. And then he gets a friendly visit from the local fuzz, who make it very clear they are never going to stop harassing him–he’ll never have a normal life again. Because of Brad Grenholz. Who is rich, and will therefore never have to worry about the police knocking his door down and searching the premises, and treating him like slime, even though he’s a criminal too.
Larry belatedly decides that of the two options Parker gave him earlier, he prefers the first one after all. He destroys any evidence he ever had a computer there–after he uses it to ‘buy’ plane tickets for Brad’s location. He makes his way to the beachfront house, which belongs to Brad’s crooked lawyer brother-in-law, George. They’re planning to make a fortune together–a fortune that should have been partly Larry’s.
He gets into the house. Wanders around a bit, stumbles into Brad. Brad is surprised, but he recovers his equilibrium quickly. And Larry feels the tug of his old identity, the self he used to inhabit, before he became a convict, and then a crook.
And all at once, Lloyd was himself again. The nerd, the follower, the number two, the fellow born to be a sidekick. The years on his own had, after all, been horrible ones, left to make his own decisions, with no one to trail after and obey. Brad was a leader, and needed Larry. Larry was a follower, and needed Brad. It was as simple as that.
Except it’s not. He can’t go back to that Larry. He died in prison. Brad killed him, and will happily do it again, given half a chance. And Larry has gotten used to making his own decisions now. He’s gotten to kind of like it. So he decides to hit a very surprised Brad with a very nice half-empty bottle of wine, again and again, until it breaks over his head. And then he’s got a very nice cutting implement to work with. Afterwards, he heads for Montana, and the life he has now. Which isn’t much, but at least it’s his. The King is dead–long live the independents.
Then there’s a chapter set at the small house for security staff at the Marino lodge. A fine group of self-obsessed social misfits, since nobody else would want the job. One of them named Dave is happily playing something called ‘DoomRanger II’ on his handheld gaming device, as he clearly intends to do for the rest of his life; we are now officially in the modern era, like it or not. He sees a bunch of ATF vehicles descending like locusts upon the estate, and experiences a moment of dislocation between the gaming world and the real one. He has no idea what this means, but he’s pretty sure it’s nothing good.
Chapter 8 comes from inside the head of Matt Rosenstein, not a happy place to be, as has already been explained.
He hated this body. He remembered who he used to be, when he was someone who wasn’t afraid of anybody, when he was stronger than anybody, and more reckless than anybody and tougher than anybody, so if anybody ever had reason to be afraid, it was the people who had to deal with Matt Rosenstein.
He knows Paul is soft, can’t protect him, and who can he call for protection? He was a scavenger bird, as Madge once told Parker. He preyed on other predators. Nobody could ever trust him, particularly those who worked with him, so he can’t call on any of them now. He assumed he could just take whatever he wanted, from anybody dumb enough to trust him, and it would never come back to bite him in the ass. Not that he can feel his ass now.
He’s not remotely concerned with what happens to Paul Brock. He’s just thinking about how to prolong his life a while longer, and for that he needs a weapon. He gets a heavy chopping blade from the kitchen, but that’s not a range weapon. Parker won’t give him the chance to use it, unless he can trick him somehow.
He can’t even move between floors now, because Paul turned off the chair lift. He hates needing Paul, hates needing anyone. He screams for Paul, and Paul comes, like a whipped dog, which is what he is, loyal to the very end, and far better than his master. They decide they better wait together for Parker to come. Matt still wants a gun, but Paul won’t give him one. He seems strangely resigned to what’s coming.
Paul doesn’t see the knife hidden beneath the blanket on Matt’s useless legs. He does know that Matt’s arms are still very strong. He knows, down inside, that Matt doesn’t care about him, but a long time ago, he surrendered a piece of his soul to the person he needed Matt Rosenstein to be, and he can never get that back again. Love can be a way to find yourself, or to lose yourself. It depends on what you do with it, and who you do it with.
A noise comes from below. Parker sized up the defenses, found them inadequate. As he so often does–as he did when he came after Brock and Rosenstein all those years before–he takes the direct route, no second story crap. He’s got one of those police battering rams. He’s inside the vestibule, where nobody will notice him smashing through the inner door, reducing it to splinters. He’ll be upstairs soon. They have nowhere to go. You’d think Brock would have invested in a panic room, but who really believes that would stop Parker? When you can’t call the law, and the attackers are determined enough, a panic room is just a tomb for the temporarily living.
Paul insists he doesn’t have a gun with him, but Matt won’t believe him. Overcome with fear-driven rage, he grabs Paul with one hand, and shakes him. The other hand has the sharp steel blade. It goes about the same way as it went with Ed Saugherty. Before he even realizes what he’s doing, it’s done.
Christ, why didn’t you give me the gun? Shit, he’s coming up, where is it, where is it?
Matt yanked Paul’s body across his lap, frisked it desperately, one-handed, knife in the other as he patted the pockets, searching…
There was no gun. There was no weapon of any kind. How could Paul not have a gun?
Matt looked up, and Parker stood in the doorway. He had a gun, a small stub pistol in his right hand. Matt lifted the slippery red knife, but there was no threat in it. He knew he was no threat. He stared at Parker, and Parker stepped forward to look at the scene. Matt let go of Paul’s arm, and the body slid off his lap onto the floor. Parker looked at it, at the knife, around at the room, and at last into Matt’s eyes. He shook his head. “You aren’t worth much,” he said, and turned around, and walked away.
Now once again I have to explain why Parker shows mercy. Or do I? Isn’t it obvious that’s not remotely what this is? Mercy would have come in the form of a bullet crashing into Rosenstein’s thick skull, but Parker doesn’t care about Rosenstein. Parker was never after Rosenstein. The target was Brock, and Brock is dead, so the hunting instinct has once again switched itself off. Parker doesn’t kill without a reason. He’s not like us.
He knew just what he’d done to Rosenstein in Philly; that the injury to his spine would never heal, and that without his body, Rosenstein was no threat to him. He knew who had been combing the internet for Parker’s location, who had used his connections to send an assassin after him, who would never stop looking for some way to kill him. Parker knew the real threat was always Paul Brock, the brains of the outfit–always more dangerous than Rosenstein, from the very start.
It was Brock, not Rosenstein, who humiliated Parker all those years before, giving him drugged coffee, so Rosenstein could interrogate him–it was Brock who made the money, it was Brock who gave Matt Rosenstein a safe home base to operate from, enabled him, indulged him, kept him out of jail all that time, kept him alive when there was no reason. Rosenstein was the id creature of this collective consciousness, nothing more. Brock was everything else. And as sometimes happens, the id has destroyed the ego, and there was never much of a superego there to start with.
Without Brock, without his legs, Rosenstein is now truly helpless. Maybe he’ll starve to death in that room. Maybe the cops will come, and he’ll wind up ranting impotently in some state nursing home (or, more likely, a prison hospital ward). Maybe he’ll have the guts to use that knife on himself. But I doubt that last one. A lot. Because the truth is, Matt Rosenstein was a coward all his life, and he’s going to die a coward.
And the other, more unsettling truth that comes to me now, is that the world we live in is full of Paul Brocks, men and women, straight and gay, all desperately seeking a Matt Rosenstein to cling to. I called Brock a dog just now, and that wasn’t right. Because as Cesar Millan once said, the primary difference between dogs and humans is that dogs don’t follow unstable energy. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s one more chapter in Part 3, but I don’t really feel the need to get into that. Part 3 of the review will be ready when it’s ready. If there’s someone you love, who deserves that love, go hug them. Now.
The Westlake Review 