Review: Breakout, Part 2

The three of us were together now in Q and I knew from old experience that anyone in Q would sell his old mother for a pack of cigarettes.  But all the same, I was puzzled and depressed.  Puzzled because I couldn’t clarify what I had really meant to say when I got up to speak at the meeting, depressed because if there was no liberty which I could define then equally there was no escape.  I remained awake for hours that night thinking of it.  Beyond the restless searchlights which stole in through every window and swept the hut till it was bright as day I could feel the wide fields of Ireland around me, but even the wide fields of Ireland were not wide enough.  Choice was an illusion.  Seeing that a man can never really get out of jail, the great thing is to ensure that he gets into the biggest possible one with the largest possible array of modern amenities.

From the short story Freedom, by Frank O’Connor

“Tile,” Parker said.  “It’s a tile wall.”

Mackey reached in to pull a strip of the Sheetrock away.  He held it in both hands and they looked at the face of it, which was pale green  “It’s waterproofed,” Mackey said.  “We found a bathroom.”

Williams said “We won’t know if there’s a mirror on it until we break it.”

“A mirror in a bathroom,” Mackey decided, “this far to the back of the building, isn’t gonna wake anybody up.  If it comes down to it, I’ll volunteer for the bad luck.”

“We’ve got all the bad luck already,” Williams told him.  “Parker and me, we already broke out once, and here we are again.”

Picking up a hammer and screwdriver, Parker said “We’re running out of time,” and went back to work.

Parker makes a good point.  I spent all of Part 1 of this review on Part One of this novel.  Part 2 has to cover Parts Two, Three, and Four.  Let’s get back to work.

Westlake started writing this book with the idea that it would be about Parker going to prison, escaping, and then doing a quick heist near the prison before heading back to New Jersey.  Now just that bare bones concept suggests a daunting array of technical challenges–how to get Parker out of prison, how to execute the heist, how to get him through the police dragnet.

But then came an even more daunting challenge, in the form of Lyme Disease, perhaps picked up while walking near his rural upstate New York home.  Westlake managed to keep typing until he’d gotten Parker out, and then went to the hospital for four days; couldn’t work for six weeks after he got out of the hospital.  Westlake was almost 70, and it’s reasonable to assume he hadn’t fully recovered by the time he started writing again.  If he ever did.

But as he said later, it was when he reviewed what he’d already written that he realized escape was the overriding theme of the entire book, not just the section dealing with the prison.  There are all kinds of prisons in this world that we may have to try and get out of–hospitals, for example.  Physical afflictions.   Prisons within prisons within prisons (to repurpose Thomas Merton).

So Parker and his ‘friends’ (maybe not quite the right word, and that’s another theme in the book–personal and professional reciprocity, the pros and cons of it, no pun intended but there it is anyway) will have to break out again and again, before they win free of this morass, and live to heist another day.

We pick up in Part Two, right after Parker, Brandon Williams, and Tom Marcantoni, have  escaped the previously escape-proof Stoneveldt Prison, with the help of Ed Mackey, and some of Marcantoni’s criminal colleagues.  They drive to an isolated area by a lake to change clothes, and take stock.  Parker and Williams gave Marcantoni their promise they’d help him and his buddies out with a heist in the nearby midwestern city Williams and Marcantoni both hail from.

This is the multi-POV part of the book, where we get to know some of the players other than Parker.  We start off with Williams, who enjoys the distinction of being the first African American POV character to appear in a Parker novel (not the first black POV character by a long shot; see The Black Ice Score).  He’s reacting about the way you’d expect a black man to react when surrounded by strange white men, all of whom are capable of violence and not much for PC. He’s wondering if he’s going to be alive much longer.

He’s also noticing that the man he knew as Kasper is being referred to as Parker. Even though he’s been a heistman for much of his adult life, he’s still the fish out of water here, but there are reasons Parker, one of the best talent scouts in his field, picked him for the escape crew, and we learn a bit about how he came to be the man he is.

Brandon Williams had grown used to this level of tension, never knowing exactly how to react to the people around him, who and what to watch out for, where it was safe to put a foot.  Part of it was skin color, but the rest was the life he’d lived, usually on the bent.  He’d had square jobs, but they’d never lasted.  He’d always known the jobs were beneath him, that he was the smartest man on the job site or the factory floor, but that it didn’t matter how smart he was, or how much he knew, or the different things he’d read.  The knowledge would make him arrogant and angry, and sooner or later there’d be a fight, or he’d be fired.

The people he mostly got along with were, like him, on the wrong side of the law.  It wasn’t that they were smart, most of them, but that they kept to themselves.  He got along with people who kept to themselves; that way, he could keep to himself, too.

I’d say Williams is a somewhat overdue homage to all the black men who’d written fan letters to Westlake (as Stark) after the Parker novels started coming out–not necessarily felons (though a lot of Stark readers were, and are), but all of them feeling alienated from society, at odds with it, and liking Parker so much because they knew he’d understand their problems, if not necessarily give a damn about them.  Not reacting to Parker as a white man, but just as somebody who knew the score, and cared no more about color than blood type.  And we all bleed red.

So Williams doesn’t trust any of these people, but he needs them, and as long as they need him too, it’s all cool.  He doesn’t like having to pull a job right out of the joint any more than Parker does, but that was Marcantoni’s price for coming in with them.  Macontoni’s crew do have a good base of operations, at an abandoned building that used to be a beer distributor.

Next chapter is Marcantoni’s, and it’s where we learn about what the heist is–a jewelry wholesaler.  But in a most unusual location.  Back around the Mid-19th century, a huge brick armory was constructed in the town, of the type Americans are well familiar with. Municipalities all over the country are still looking for something to do with these white elephants, built like fortresses because that’s what they were, now that most of them are no longer needed for their original purpose.  Williams remembers when they used this one for track and field, but that didn’t last.

(Up top, you can see a picture of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, an exceptionally fine example of the general architectural form; built in 1910, and New York is still looking for something useful to do with it.)

The city finally gave up on the place, sold it to developers, who turned the upper levels into expensive condos.  But the ground floor was a problem, because it really had been built to repel invaders (‘like if the Indians had tanks’ Marcantoni snarkily observes).  Very thick walls, very narrow windows.  Who wants a place like that?  Somebody with something valuable to protect, but no need to bring in customers off the street.

Marcantoni, needing a job after his parole, got hired to work on the reconstruction project.  And he found out something really neat (seriously, if I found this, I’d want to pull a heist too).  The original builders put in a secret tunnel in case the defenders, (perhaps under siege from Lakota warriors armed with medieval trebuchets) needed to escape.  Not in the official plans, completely forgotten about.   And the other end of the tunnel is in the old library building across the street.

Williams, smartest man in the room as usual (with one possible exception), has some concerns about the structural stability of a 150 year old tunnel, but here’s the problem.  Marcantoni is in love with this job.  He can’t see past it. He’s waited a long time to pull it (so nobody would remember he was on the reconstruction crew).  It’s the main reason he escaped.  He knows he needs a big crew to deal with the logistical problems, and he doesn’t mind splitting the very substantial proceeds six ways.  He will take it very personally if Parker and his friends don’t live up to their end of the agreement.  It’s agreed they’ll do it Sunday.  Nobody much feels like waiting around.

Chapter 3 is from the perspective of Goody, a lowlife Williams has the misfortune to be acquainted with.  He’s heard about the escape.  He knows Williams’ sister, about the only person on earth Williams is close to.   He goes to see her, and says if her brother gets in touch, let him know, maybe he could help. Help himself to a nice fat reward, is what he’s thinking.  Like so many a minor Stark POV character, he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and before long his plans come to naught, but he will figure into the plot later, so worth mentioning.

And then we’re at an exercise class inside the armory, and who should we see but Brenda Mackey, attending an exercise class.  She doesn’t need to get in shape, her shape is delightful as always, but she knows her husband Ed is going to rob this place, and she knows sometimes he needs help out of a jam (like that time in New York when he almost died), so she’s there to scout the place out in case she’s needed again.  Ed didn’t tell her to do this, but then again, he didn’t tell her not to do it.

(Later, we have another nice raunchy sex scene between the two, just before the heist–reminiscent of the one in Plunder Squad, and Brenda doesn’t seem to speak ersatz Chinese during coitus anymore, but she’s still quite vocal.)

It all goes fine, except Brenda catches the eye of Darlene Johnson-Ross, the woman who owns the studio, and this woman seems bothered by Brenda.   In the chapter after that, we find out this woman is having an affair with Henry Freedman, he whose jewelry wholesale business is about to get broken into, and she’s worried this attractive fit young woman taking a class much too easy for her is some kind of detective, or IRS agent, or something.  And all Henry is worried about is his wife finding out about Darlene.

Next we meet CID Detective Jason Rembek, who has been charged with recapturing the three escapees from Stoneveldt.  He knows most guys who break prison have no plan for what to do once they’re out, so are easily rounded up again.  He’s wondering if these three will be more of a challenge.  ‘Kasper’ is the one that attracts the most attention from him.

Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper.  A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone.  Hard eyes; if they were the windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.

So.  The heist.  As happens surprisingly often with Stark, it’s very cleverly written, takes up just one chapter, and is, shall we say, not 100% successful. They go in through the library, as planned. They get into the tunnel, as planned. They shore up the tunnel with folding tables, as planned. They get the jewels as planned. The ancient tunnel, in long-standing disrepair, compromised by street work above, collapses on Marcantoni and his two friends, Angioni and Kolaski, on their way out, very nearly smothering Williams too, except Parker pulls him out by the legs.  Not quite exactly as planned.

So they have a fortune in gems and watches.  Nobody knows they’re there, no alarms were tripped.  But the way the place is set up, and with the tunnel now permanently closed off, there’s no obvious way of exiting this part of the building without alerting security, who will alert the law, and it’s back to prison for all three of them (including Mackey, who wasn’t even in prison–he was just doing Parker a favor here–no good deed, huh?).

Williams wants to thank Parker for pulling him out of that hole, and Parker won’t let him.  He didn’t do it for Williams.  He did it because once again, he needs a crew to break out of a prison.  And this one they walked right into of their own free will.  He knew it was a mistake.  But he did it anyway.  End of Part Two, which is the only part of the book that isn’t about escaping from somewhere.

Part Three is the shortest of the four sections (Part One is the longest).  44 pages of Parker, Mackey, and Williams trying to get out of that armory without getting caught.  First thing they have to do is drop the loot.  It’s only going to slow them down, and they don’t have a fence for it–that was Marcantoni’s side of things, and the contact info died with him.

I like this part of the book a lot, the desolate desperate lonely feel of it, but there’s not much point in carefully synopsizing it.  It’s purely about three guys expert in breaking into places they’re not supposed to be trying to figure out a way to break out of a place they’re not supposed to be before morning, when none of them, of necessity, has ever been in there before, or done any advance scouting (Brenda did, but she isn’t there).  That quote up top tells you how it’s going to go.  Finding tools, breaking through walls, trying to avoid making too much noise, or setting off any alarms.  There are a lot of people living in this place.

They finally get out to where they could make it to the street, but not without passing the doorman for the apartments.  They need a distraction for him.  Mackey has a brainstorm.  They’re in an office.  There’s a yellow pages.  There’s a phone.  He finds an all-night pizza place.  He orders a pie.  Pepperoni, if you’re curious.  The guard goes to let the delivery guy in.  They get to the stairwell–but the stairs only go up.  Not down to the parking garage, where they wanted to go. An interesting exchange follows.

Parker said, “It’s the goddam security in this place.  They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.”

“Well,” Mackey said, “that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.”

Williams said, “Bullshit.  There’s no such thing as safety.”

“You’re right,” Mackey told him.  “But they don’t know that.”

We still don’t.

So they finally get to where they can get out to the street, but now they have a new problem.  Donald Westlake was a born problem solver, and this is the kind of problem he can truly relate to.  The physical challenges, but also the strategic ones.  They need more than just a means of egress–they need a means of escape, transportation, so they’re not trapped on  the empty streets outside, just waiting around for the law to scoop them up.

Mackey figures they can call Brenda–she can come pick them up.  Except none of them has a cellphone.  They have to go back into the trap, break into another office, use the phone there.  And then it turns out Brenda’s motel room phone is set not to receive calls until tomorrow morning.  And she doesn’t have a cellphone either.  They need somebody to come get them.  Williams has a really dangerous idea.

Goody.  Williams knows, for a stone fact, that Goody wants to sell him to the law. But he also knows Goody is stupid and greedy enough to come get him.  He and Parker work it out–set up a meet at a camera store across the street.  He’ll say he wants Goody to drop him in a little town nearby, where some relatives live, and he can hide out with them.  Goody will figure he can bring him there, then call the law on him–low risk, high reward, except Goody doesn’t know about Parker and Mackey.  They’ll just take the car and go.

(All three are heeled.  Parker has his usual go-to, the five shot Smith & Wesson Terrier .32 snubnose.  Now I’ll quibble, very briefly.  We’re told back in Part Two that Mackey has a Beretta Jaguar .22–we’re told he equipped Parker and Williams similarly.  Then we’re told in Part Three that Parker has a Terrier.  Let’s do a side-by-side comparison, shall we?

Okay, they’re both small handguns.  Other than that, not terribly similar.  And this is easily explained by Mackey knowing Parker’s tastes in armament.  And it still bothers me.  And this is why authors of crime fiction should think twice about getting specific on guns.)

Now what I left out of the Part Two synopsis is that Goody, who is a smalltime drug dealer, ran into problems with his supplier, who is a bit less small-time, and who had his men do things to Goody until he told them about the reward money he planned to get for Williams.  They’re going to come along and make sure they get their share.

So things get a bit confusing once they run out there to Goody’s black Mercury, and all of a sudden there’s a Land Rover pulling up, and three men with guns jump out.  Parker quickly figures the guy in the back of the Land Rover as the boss, drops him, and the other two are nothing without their brain.  Williams gives his old pal in the Merc a proper thank you for his loyalty.  So they end up driving away in the Land Rover, Williams at the wheel, the four interlopers left behind with bullet holes in them, and that’s the end of that subplot.  Goody.

Except a lot of gunfire in the street was never the ideal version of their plan. There’s jumpy security-obsessed rich people calling the police in those fancy apartments up above.  They figure on ditching the Land Rover for a car Mackey has stashed nearby.  There’s a lot of maneuvering through a parking garage they take refuge in, and let’s just skip over that part.  “All I want,” Williams said, “is to be in a place I’m not trying to get out of.”  You said a mouthful, brother.

They get to where Mackey stashed a Honda, and it’s still too soon to contact Brenda–who has a car of her own.  So they offer Williams the Honda so he can get over the state line, start over.  He’s touched.  He gets the hell out of there before they can change their minds.  Strange strange white people.  They get some sleep, but then Mackey wakes Parker up.  Brenda has been arrested.  They have to break her out of jail.

Hey, maybe now would be the time for a little musical interlude, what do you say?  I posted an image of a watchtower in Part 1.  Here’s the song to go with it.

(I could have gone with Dylan, but you know, The Experience was two ofays and a brother as well.  Though this power trio we’re looking at is maybe a bit more even in the talent department.)

Part Four is less focused, more freewheeling.  Lots of ground to cover.  Parker comes downstairs, and finds Mackey and Williams sitting at the table.  Williams was supposed to be headed for the border, but just when he thought he was out, he pulls himself back in.  He heard about Brenda’s arrest on the radio, figured Parker and Mackey might need a hand. This is the first thing he’s done in the book to lower Parker’s opinion of him.

The radio provided Williams with a lot of information.  The cops found Marcantoni and the others in the rubble, dead of course.  They figure Parker and Williams were involved too.  Brenda got arrested by doing what she always does–hanging around nearby when Mackey is doing a job, in case he needs her to rescue him.  Like she did that time in New York, which is how Mackey is still alive, but without cellphones, there was no practical way she could help out, and that woman from the dance studio saw her hanging around and called the police. They figure she’s the brains of the outfit.  Which might be true if it was just her and Ed.

They have her in a city lock-up.  Williams knows the place.  Not as tough as Stoneveldt, but tough.  Ed’s all for going in.  Williams is dubious, but game.

Parker wants no part of this.  It’s long past time for him to get out of this hick town, like he should have done to start with.  Ed senses his reluctance, is angered by it.  Please remember, not only did Brenda save Ed’s life once–she’s the one who made Ed stick around and wait for Parker after that heist they pulled in Comeback.  Ed helped him break prison just now, stood by him on a heist that clearly wasn’t planned out properly, just out of loyalty.  If Parker owes anybody in this world, he owes Brenda and Ed Mackey. But in his mind, he doesn’t owe anyone anything.  Parker didn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off; is what the narrator tersely informs us.

Excuse me?   Mr. Stark?  Have you forgotten every previous book in this series?  ‘Debts accumulated and paid off ‘is basically all Parker lives by, starting with the debts he collected from his wife, and his former partner, and an entire criminal syndicate, in the very first of those books.  Debts Accumulated And Paid Off might as well be the epitaph on his tombstone, assuming he gets one.  Parker has risked himself far more seriously than this to pay off a blood debt to somebody who wronged him.  He’s also risked himself several times to help criminal associates like Handy McKay and Alan Grofield, though there were other factors involved besides loyalty each time.

You can, if you want, explain this away.  Parker comes after people who wrong him in some way because their treachery triggered a response he has no control over, and he needs to kill them to restore his mental equilibrium.  He helps fellow heisters he’s working a job with because that’s part of his professional ethic, and because he might need to work with them again someday–in this case, the job was over as soon as they got out of the armory.

He tells himself he’ll have to help Ed and Brenda now, because otherwise if he and Ed work together again someday, Ed won’t trust him anymore–but seeing as we never see him work with Ed again in the series, and he’s got a lot of other names stored away in his head, that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason.

It’s a much bigger motivational problem than the one in The Jugger, that bothered Westlake so much, and Westlake should have seen that.  If Parker isn’t helping the Mackeys out of professional solidarity, or out of a sense of obligation for what they’ve done for him–as Williams, a near-stranger is willing to do, just because Ed let him have the Honda–why the hell is he doing it?

Because Stark can’t let him do anything else.  Stark can’t ever let Parker appear ignoble.  But neither can Stark allow his pragmatic anti-hero any virtuous motives.  And usually that works out fine.  And this time, it feels a mite forced. As if Westlake, still hollowed out by his recent illness, couldn’t fully access that part of himself that could interpret Parker’s thoughts for us.  I had only read two previous Parker novels when I first got to this one.  I already knew it was wrong to say Parker doesn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off.  But how else would you say it?

But in critiquing the way Stark does it here, I still appreciate what an important question is being asked.  No matter how independent you are, you are still going to need help sometimes.  In order to reliably receive help, you will need to offer it in return.  Was Brenda right when she pulled Ed out of that burning lumberyard, but wrong when she was waiting around outside the armory to see if he needed her again?  How could she ever know for sure?  How can you know when you’ve crossed the line between legitimate obligations and sucker bets?  And isn’t there anything in this world besides debts accumulated and paid off?

Ed doesn’t care if he owes Brenda or not, because he loves her (he never says it, and he doesn’t need to).  If he walked away from her now, he’d be nothing. (Parker would never walk away from Claire either, of course, because she’s a part of him).  Williams just wants to respect himself in the morning–to feel like the man he was born to be, that society wouldn’t let him be in any other walk of life. Parker and Mackey see that man when they look at him, and that’s why he came back.

Parker feels none of this, for any of them.  But he’s caught in a web of conflicting obligations (my Celtic ancestors used to call them geasa and they’ve killed no end of tough guys). Another kind of prison.  Ed’s sense of obligation to him was a necessary factor in his escape from the actual prison he ended up in because of a confederate who acted as if his only obligation was to himself.  There’s no solution to this equation.  You just have to decide what feels right to you, and accept the consequences.  And never know if you’ve chosen correctly until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Ultimately the only answer to this conundrum is that Stark is a romantic, and Parker isn’t.  Let’s get back to the synopsis.

As romantic as it unquestionably would be to shoot their way into the jail, like the 1920’s heisters, or the Old West outlaws, Parker has a less sanguinary plan. He still has the card for the criminal attorney Claire got him.  A very capable shyster, Mr. Jonathan Li.  And if they can just get Brenda released on her own recognizance, the charges against her dropped, she can go on living  in the straight world, instead of being a fugitive like Parker and Ed.

Li knows he is now dealing with fugitives from the law, and as long as they don’t implicate him, and the check doesn’t bounce (or hell, just send cash), he’s got zero problems with helping them.  The problem lies with Darlene Johnson-Ross. She’s the one who spotted Brenda waiting in the car, recognized her blonde hair, called the law.  (I don’t accept Brenda is a blonde, it’s never been mentioned before now, but we can talk about that in the comments section.)

If this woman dropped her complaint, they’d have nothing to hold Brenda on, and Li could do the rest in his sleep.  But she has to drop it.  She can’t just disappear, conveniently and forever, or Brenda will be held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.  Li knows who he’s talking to here, never doubt it.

What follows is probably my least favorite part of the book, that involves finding Johnson-Ross at her house, with her lover (the guy they almost robbed), and using a variety of threats (none of them terribly veiled) to convince her to go tell the police she made a mistake, and this is definitely not the same dame.  If she doesn’t, then they’ll kill her boyfriend.  It’s a bit hard to understand why she cares, given that he’s possibly more terrified of his wife finding out about them than he is of these three desperate criminals with guns, but who can explain it, who can tell you why, fools give you reasons, Freedman doesn’t die.  Turns out he makes really nice sandwiches, and Ed figures you don’t shoot a guy who feeds you.

This is the last prison they find themselves in, unable to leave her house until they know Brenda is out, wondering if the police will come by and check, which they do, but not seriously.  Williams makes his exit (in Freedman’s Infiniti) before they find out what happens, because seriously, he’s done his share and then some.  They never would have even found the house without somebody who knows the area.

(It’s a bit too cute, this part.  Too Dortmunder-esque, except you know that these guys actually can kill people.  Mackey is his usual jocular self, even helps Darlene with the dishes.  Freedman gets Stockholm Syndrome, starts identifying with his captors.  I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, it’s just a bit much that we spend more time on this hostage caper than on the robbery.  Well, anything for Brenda.)

Endgame.  Brenda’s been released, Li worked his magic.  She’s taking a cab to the airport.  Ed will rendezvous with her there–the cops don’t know his face. They’ll get the car they have in long-term parking, and drive out of state.  Of course the law is tailing her.  Parker can’t go with them.  He’s going to need another ride.

And who should he spot in a remote area of the airport but Detective Turley–you know, the one who talked about game theory so much.  They’ll get to talk about that some more.  Parker commandeers Turley and his vehicle.  Turley’s a pro, and he knows by this time Parker is no less professional on his side of the law. He wants to live to type up his report.  So he gets them past security, and they get the hell out of Dodge.

Bit of driving to do now.  Might as well chat to pass the time.  Turley mentions that even though he’s a state cop, the car they’re in belongs to the local police.  A few years back, there was a proposal floated to the city government–equip all the squad cars with location devices–so that if a car went missing, they could find it.  You know what the city fathers said?  “You boys are local law enforcement, you know exactly where you are.”  Turley’s having a good chuckle about that now. Parker is less amused.  He’d probably have had to kill Turley and find another car if they’d shelled out for that tech.  Turley’s not done gabbing, and Parker knows why.

Just as Parker had known what Turley was doing underneath his words back in Stoneveldt, he understood now what this cosy chat was all about.  Turley was a good cop, but he was also mortal.  His second job, if he could do it, was to bring Parker in, but his first job was to keep himself alive.  Talk with a man, exchange confidences with him, he’s less likely to pull the trigger if and when the time comes.  Like Mackey deciding to do it the more difficult way because Henry had made him lunch.

This wouldn’t work on Parker, but he doesn’t need Turley dead.  There’s a railroad town coming up.  Also a major truck stop.  He leaves Turley by the roadside, in the middle of nowhere, throwing his gun into a cornfield where he’ll take some time finding it (but won’t be humiliated by Parker having taken it away from him).  Parker ditches the police Plymouth, and looks for his ride out of this goddam flat state.

He has a pretty good idea of what he’s looking for, or rather, whom.   A couple in their 40’s or 50’s, who own and operate a big rig together.  More and more of those on the road now–must have been a fairly new trend back when this book was written.  (Parker, like his creator, never stops watching people–you never know what bit of information will come in handy).  They’ll invite him aboard just to have somebody to talk to, chat on the porch, so to speak.  A lone trucker wouldn’t want to risk it.  A couple seeks out company, to spice up their own relationship.

Then here they came.  He knew they were right the instant they walked out of the cafe.  Mid fifties, both overweight from sitting in the truck all the time, dressed alike in boots and jeans and windbreakers and black cowboy hats, they were obviously comfortable together, happy, telling each other stories. Parker rose and walked toward them, and they stopped, grinning at him, as though they’d expected him.

They had.  “I knew it,” the man said, and said to his wife, “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Well, it was pretty obvious,” she said.

Parker said, “You know I want a lift.”

Marty and Gail.  Quite possibly the nicest people Parker’s ever met, which I suppose isn’t the highest praise that can be given, but they’re pretty darn nice. They can get him as far as Baltimore.  He says he could walk home from Baltimore.  They’ve got a Sterling Aero Bullet Plus.  Probably not unlike this one. Don’t really know much about trucks.  I do know the drivers matter more than the trucks do.   At least until it’s all done with computers and GPS.  Watch your backs, Martys & Gails of the world.  Google Trucks is coming for you.

Parker has a good story to tell them about how he lost his car and his money in Vegas, and there was a woman involved.  He doesn’t get into detail much about it.  They can fill in the blanks themselves.  All they know is that he’s headed for New Jersey.  Well, that’s all they know officially, put it that way.  Marty in particular knows more than he’s saying.

There’s a police roadblock coming up.  Marty tells Parker he doesn’t feel like dealing with it, so he’s going to take the scenic route, on the side roads.  Get back on the highway once they’re past the cops.  And he’s got a little story of his own to tell Parker.  He did time once.  Attempted robbery.  Served four years, which was the minimum.

“Four  years is a long minimum,” Parker said.

“Oh, you know it.”  Marty concentrated on the road awhile, then said, “I know there’s fellas belong in there, I know there’s fellas I’d prefer was in there, but after being in there myself I could never put a man in a cage, personally.  Never.”

“I know the feeling,” Parker said.

“If a man wants to learn from his mistakes, fine,” Marty said.  “You look at me.  You see the job I gave myself.  Coast-to-coast hauling.  You can’t get much farther from a four-man cage inside a six-hundred-man cage inside a four-thousand-man cage.”

Prisons within prisons within prisons.  But there’s always a way out, if you look hard enough.  And there’s people who’ll help you, if you ask.  The decent people of this earth.  The sane ones.  They do exist.

But Parker, I’m just wondering–what if  things turned out so that you had to kill these good people, who are helping you for no reason at all other than that they feel like it?  What if that was the only way you could stay free? Would you do it? Could you? I’m asking a question, Parker.  Answer me, damn you.  Silence. That figures.

They pass the roadblock, and Marty says the state troopers are just doing what they were told.  “They aren’t hunters.  They’re just boys doing a job.”   Maybe he knows what’s sitting next to him in the cab, while his wife sleeps peacefully in back.  Maybe not.  We don’t see Parker say goodbye to them.  Which means we don’t know if they were still alive when he left them–knowing what they do about him, where he came from, where he was headed.  We don’t even get that much of an answer to my question.  But Parker doesn’t kill when he doesn’t need to.  That I know.  He’s not one of us.

And Chapter 17 of Part Four is so short, I can type the whole damn thing.  Why not?

Claire rolled over when he walked into the room.  Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, but she didn’t say anything as she watched him move.  Out of his pocket and onto the dresser went the three Patek watches that were the only result of the jewel job.  He stripped and got into bed and then, folding into his arms, she said, “Gone a long time.”

“It felt like a long time.”

“I knew you’d be back,” she said.

“This time,” he said.

Just FYI, some Patek Phillipe & Co. watches sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars–some can even cost millions.  Probably a midwest wholesaler wouldn’t have the top of the line models, but Parker would have picked the best of the bunch available, and he can find a fence for three watches easily enough.  He really does not like to walk away empty-handed from a job.  Neither did Donald E. Westlake.

What I walk away from this book with is a sense that the walls are starting to close in on Parker, in a way we haven’t seen before.  Yes, he got away, but the law caught him, photographed his new face, connected it to his old fingerprints.  He’s got a few more killings to his official credit, not that he needed any more to go away for life.  He’s still having a harder and harder time finding jobs he can pull in this strange new world of electronic cash, electronic surveillance, ever-faster information sharing between far-flung police departments.

He still has to work with unreliable people sometimes, which creates points of vulnerability–and when he works with people he can trust, because they trust him, that creates other points of vulnerability, perhaps even more dangerous.

He’s free, but it’s not unqualified freedom, liberty without caveats.  I suppose there’s no such thing.  He’s certainly got a wider range of amenities in that house, with Claire (a fine amenity in herself).   But he has to keep paying for them.  He has to keep hunting, like any predator.  And sooner or later, every predator becomes the prey.  Nobody runs forever.  Yes, this is foreshadowing. Three more books left.  Which can, arguably, be seen as one long book.  Or one multi-faceted work of art.

The next Parker novel was published two years after this one, and by all rights, I should get to it in a few more weeks.  But I’m going to break with my usual habit of reviewing books in the order in which they were published.  Two rather unsatisfying standalone books are next, neither of them books Westlake will be remembered for, though both with things to recommend them.  Then a whole lot of Dortmunder: novels, novellas, short stories, workout routines.

And then we’ll get to the defacto conclusion of the Parker Saga, along with the very last Dortmunder, and the very last Westlake novel ever to be published.  The end, in fact, of the primary literary oeuvre of Donald E. Westlake, hard and painful as that is to believe.  And by extension, the end of my needing to publish an article here every week or so.  One prison I’m feeling rather ambiguous about breaking out of.  But there’s always another one waiting outside. Right?

Review: Breakout

I spent four nights and five days in that jail, and hated it, even more than you might expect.  Every instant was intolerable.  I hate being here now; I hate being here now; I hate being here now.

Years later, when I was writing novels about criminals, and when at least some of the criminals were still literate, I’d occasionally get a fan letter from somebody doing time, and in a few instances, when I replied, I gave an edited version of my own jail time so I could ask the question: How can you live in an intolerable state for years?  I couldn’t stand one single second of it for a mere five days; how do you do it year after year?

The answer I got was always the same, with minor variations.  Yes, what I described was what they, too, had gone through, the absolute unbearable horror, but I’d quit the experience too early.  Some time in the second week, they told me, your brain flips over and this becomes the reality.  This becomes where you live now.  And how, I wonder, do you come back from that damage?

From the unpublished memoirs of Donald E. Westlake, excerpted in The Getaway Car.

The first week is the hardest.  The change from outside, from freedom to confinement, from spreading your arms wide to holding them in close to your body, is so abrupt and extreme that the mind refuses to believe it.  Second by second, it keeps on being a rotten surprise, the worst joke in the world.  You keep thinking, I can’t stand this, I’m going to lose my mind, I’m going to wig out or off myself, I can’t stand this now and now and now.

Then, sometime in the second week, the mind’s defenses kick in, the brain just flips over, and this place, this impossible miserable place, just becomes the place where you happen to live.  These people are the people you live among, these rules are the rules you live within.  This is your world now, and it’s the other one that isn’t real any more.

Parker wondered if he’d be here that long.

Marcantoni said, “How come you trust Kasper, that’s what I don’t get.  He’s a white guy.”

“He looks like a door to me,” Williams said.  “I never did care what color a door was.”

You ever wonder why stories about prison breaks are so perennially popular?   I don’t mean someone imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, like that famously vengeful count, or Steve McQueen escaping the Nazis, or Jean Gabin escaping what came before the Nazis, and a meaningless bloody war along with it–that doesn’t need explanation.  Good vs. evil, freedom vs. confinement, is all that is.   (Granted, the prison comandante in Grand Illusion wasn’t so bad, but the system he worked for was, and so was the system Jean Gabin’s character worked for, and that’s the story of pretty nearly every war ever fought, kids.)

I’m talking about the prison break stories where there’s no question the escapees are guilty of the crimes they were imprisoned for, that society had legitimate reasons for locking them up,  and short of some Shawshank silliness (put me with those who say that film is wildly overrated), there’s not much chance of them going straight once they do break out.  They’re not breaking out to make a new life.  They’re breaking out because they can’t do anything else; a reflex action, as unavoidable and automatic as jerking your hand from a hot stove.

And we root for them to escape their escape-proof cells in fiction, even though if the same exact guys escaped in reality (and they do, frequently), we’d be screaming at the law to round them up and throw them back in the hole they just crawled out of.   It seems that we identify with them more behind bars than when they’re out in the world with us.  What are we seeing in these stories?

It’s a sub-genre better known from the movies than from prose fiction (though many of those movies were based on prose fiction).  Let me run down a few of my personal favorites.  Cool Hand Luke.  Escape From Alcatraz.  Le Trou.  But I think maybe the king of them all is Jules Dassin’s Brute Force–from 1947, back when Law&Order always won, and boy do they ever (with casualties on both sides). If that movie doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.

You’ll see an image from the opening of that film I posted up top–I had to do the screen capture myself, from YouTube, and I’m not any kind of wiz at that, so if your screen isn’t hi-res enough for you to make out the words beneath that grim watchtower, they read Westgate Penitentiary.  Yeah.  You want to bet Westlake didn’t notice that?  Any takers?  No?  Smart.

This type of prison break story is almost always tragic, of course.  Just like heist stories are mainly tragic.  Yes, we want to see these prisoners escape, just like we want to see daring robbers steal things, but something has to go wrong.  They have to fail in the end, go down bloody, or be dragged back into chains, perhaps after winning some symbolic moral victory.  You know what Richard Stark had to say to that?  Nothing terribly polite.

Yes, realistically speaking, violent death or renewed imprisonment is the likely fate of anyone who breaks prison and/or robs a bank. One or the other.  Sooner or later.  But what would make it later, as opposed to sooner?  Next time, instead of this time?

Parker was partly a reaction to Dillinger, who robbed banks and broke prison, and the law sure wasn’t taking any chances with regards to him doing it again.  Why didn’t Dillinger last longer?  Because he liked publicity too much.  Because he was too flashy.  Because he made himself a walking target for the equally publicity-hungry G-Men, his face on every post office wall, his name making headlines everywhere he went. Because he was apparently out to prove something.

And Parker goes out of his way not to do that–part of the point of these books is Westlake trying to solve the problem of how to be like Dillinger without ending up like Dillinger.  Parker couldn’t care less about being famous.  Parker isn’t fighting the system.  He’s subverting it, avoiding it, confusing it, blending into it, defeating it.  He slips through the cracks and he’s gone.  He won’t be writing any letters to the editor about it afterwards.

Parker is a wolf, not a man.  Wolves don’t have existentialist crises.  Wolves just want to make another kill, get back to the den, live to hunt another day.  Like any wolf, he needs a pack to make that work.  So he looks around him for the rare individuals in his line of work who share at least part of this lupine ethos with him.  The professionals.  But  those are rare in any field of endeavor, and sometimes he has to settle for the half-wit hare-brained helots that probably do belong in prison.  That’s where this story begins.

An alarm goes off in a warehouse somewhere in the flat dry midwest.  Parker and his string had been stealing pharmaceuticals to be sold offshore, but the local boy they had to recruit got greedy, went into the office to see if there was something extra he could take.  Their lockman hadn’t disarmed that one.  The cops are coming.  The screw-up, named Bruhl, panics and takes their truck (then crashes it).   There’s nowhere to hide in the desolate industrial park at night (no amusement park this time).  Parker runs, knowing it’s futile.  A squad car fixes its searchlight on him.  He gives up.   The law finally got him.

The second time we know of that Parker has been arrested–first time he’s been arrested for a felony.  The other time was for vagrancy, after Lynn shot him, in The Hunter.  He gave them the alias Ronald Kasper (I feel pretty sure Parker wasn’t referring to Kaspar Hauser, but not so sure about Stark).

They got his fingerprints, and stuck him in a prison camp in California.  He only had to wait out his short sentence and he’d be free.  He escaped, killing a guard on his way out,  made his way east to deal with Lynn, Mal, and The Outfit.  So very long ago, but fingerprints don’t age.  Parker knew that from the start.  Now he’s being confronted by an investigator from the state police, who knows too much about him.  And unlike that hick police chief in The Jugger, this one’s honest, and smart, and Parker can’t just kill him.

“The system makes mistakes,” Parker said.

Turley’s grin turned down, not finding anything funny here.  “So do individuals, my friend,” he said.  Looking into his dossier again, he said, “There is no Ronald Kasper, not before, not since.  In the prison camp, out, left behind these prints, one guard dead.  Do you want to know his name?”

Parker shook his head.  “Wouldn’t mean anything to me.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t.  We have some other names for you.”

Edward Johnson.  Charles Willis.  Edward Lynch.  Even ‘Parker, no first name’ (how does Turley know it isn’t a first  name?).  They have that one too.  They have him on Murder One, in California, and California wants to extradite.

Turley makes some mention of game theory–aka The Prisoner’s Dilemma.  They have all of Parker’s colleagues locked up.  Bruhl is badly hurt, but he may live. The others are in the same temporary holding facility Parker is on, but on different levels, so he can’t talk to them.  Turkey suggests that whichever one of them spills the beans first about who their buyer for the drugs was is going to get a better deal with regards to future incarceration.  Parker says he’s heard of game theory.  But that was never his game.   And he’s more about praxis.

(If I go into detail about all the connections between this book and Put A Lid On It, I’ll  use up too much space.  Game theory, a temporary holding facility for prisoners awaiting trial, having to do a job right after getting out of the joint–Westlake sometimes treated his research and the basic framework of a plot like a theater set where many different dramas–and comedies–could be enacted before he tore it down and built a new one. Part of how he was able to put on so many lively productions.)

Parker is assigned a public defender, a black man, who is clearly going to do no more than the bare minimum, because that’s all he’s got the time and energy for (and his client is clearly guilty of all charges).  He advises Parker to cooperate. Parker sizes him up as somebody who can’t do the job that needs doing–delay the extradition, give him time to plan–but can be trusted to keep his clients’ confidences.  Parker gives him a letter to mail to Claire.  Claire will get him a criminal attorney.  Parker isn’t part of the public, and he can defend himself.  He will need the help of a very different black man, though.

The new lawyer hired by Claire is named Jonathan Li, and he knows the score.  He gets paid very well for doing whatever his clients ask of him, as long it’s (somewhat) within the law.  He will delay the extradition, throw grit into the wheels of justice, slow everything down.  He doesn’t argue with Parker about the futility of his requests.  The customer is always right. He also informs Parker that his former brother-in-law wants to see him.  Parker has no in-laws, past or present.  But does he say that?  No, he just waits to find out who it is–Ed Mackey.  Claire’s been busy.

Parker is once again baffled by the way some of his criminal associates will go to bat for him in ways that he finds excessive.  One of the identity puzzles of this book is trying to figure out Parker’s rationale for when you help somebody and when you don’t.  In this case Ed is going to try and spring Parker because of what happened with George Liss in Comeback, the first of this five-book series of interlocking titles, of which Breakout is the last.

Parker stopped Liss from killing them both, then finished Liss off later on, and Ed feels like he owes Parker one.  Parker isn’t in a position to complain about what he sees as illogical behavior, so he says nothing about it.  He asks Ed to check up on four guys in the same cellblock as him, see if any of them can be trusted–or not.  Williams.  Jelinek.  Clayton (bit of a nod to The Mercenaries?).  Marcantoni.

And on Ed’s return visit, three full decades after Plunder Squad, we finally find out why he’s still alive–and why he always has his wife Brenda with him when he’s working.

Some years ago, Brenda had trailed Mackey and Parker, though she hadn’t been asked to, when they went to deliver some stolen paintings in a deal that then went very bad.  At the end, Parker left a lumberyard’s burning main building, with the paintings destroyed, and he’d believed Mackey was dead, shot by one of the people who’d been waiting in there.  Brenda, seeing Parker take off alone, went into the building, found Mackey on the concrete floor, and dragged him out and into her car before the fire engines arrived.

“Fortunately,” Mackey said, “life is usually quieter than that.”

Unfortunately, Jelinek is a prison rat, who sells information about his fellow inmates to the bulls (another overlapping detail from Put A Lid On It, much more significant to the story here).  Clayton is serving a short stretch, escaping makes no sense for him, don’t even bring it up.  Williams and Marcantoni are smart solid pros heading for long sentences, just like Parker.   Bingo.  He knows what he’s got to work with in terms of putting a crew together–now he just has to get them to join up.   Ed can reach out to them through mutual acquaintances on the outside.  But they still have to trust Parker–and each other.  Williams, a black man, is one of Parker’s cellmates–him first.

“You’re facing twenty-five to life,” Parker told him.

Williams turned his head to look at Parker’s profile.  “Your friend Ed got this on the outside.”

“Nobody gets anything in here.”

Williams shrugged.  “And so what?”

Parker said, “I’m not good at prison.”

Williams laughed.  “Who is?”

“Some are,” Parker said.

Williams sobered, looking away again at the scene below.  “And that’s true.”  He sounded as though he didn’t like the thought.

“I don’t think you are,” Parker said.

Williams shook his head.  “I can feel myself getting smaller every day.  You fight it, but there it is.” He turned his head to study Parker’s face.  “You aren’t thinking of breaking out of here.”

“Why not?”

“This is not an easy place.”

Parker thinks Stoneveldt could actually be easier to escape than a regular penitentiary.  (That name, by the way, is a definite nod to Stonevelt, the penitentiary from Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, Westlake’s only novel set entirely in a prison–well, not exactly true–read the review, or better still, the book).

What makes it hard to escape is that there’s no time for short-term inmates to get to know each other, form connections, team up.  The gangs, white and black, that exist in long-term lock-ups aren’t here, because there’s no point to them.  It’s just a bunch of individuals, waiting to find out if they go free sooner, later, or never.  Many lack the brains, others lack the ambition (since they don’t know yet how long they’re in for), and all of them lack the organization, because it’s a place that encourages that every man for himself attitude.

For this reason, perhaps, there’s not enough guards for the overcrowded facility.  Security isn’t nearly as tight as some places.  A small gang of motivated pros could beat this joint.  They just need one more.  But self-evidently a guy named Marcantoni is white.  And just because there’s no race gangs in this joint doesn’t mean race isn’t on everybody’s mind there.   Like it is everywhere else, whether we admit it or not.  Marcantoni’s not one for mincing words.  Though he avoids the obvious one, to his credit.

Marcantoni made a sour face and shook his head.  “You want to work with a black guy?”

“Why not?”

“Group loyalty,” Marcantoni said.  “One of the first things I learned in life, stick with the group where there’s a chance for loyalty.  There’s never a guarantee, but a chance.  A black guy doesn’t feel loyalty for you and me.  He’d trade us for chewing gum, and we’d do the same for him.”

As we saw in The Black Ice Score, Parker doesn’t give a damn about this tribal crap.  Wolves don’t see color, because color doesn’t tell them anything they need to know.  He needs people he can work with, there’s damned few available, and no time to wait around for a color-coordinated crew to appear.  If Marcantoni doesn’t like it, he can stick around, serve his time, and Parker will find somebody else.  Marcantoni decides the one color he can’t stand is prison gray.

They have to be careful about where they talk.  Even though there’s no gangs, blacks and whites don’t mingle, unless they’re in the same cell, like Parker and Williams.  The three of them confer while using the weights to work out.  Williams and Marcantoni size each other up, and find they have plenty in common.  Most of all a desire to get out of this place.

There is a catch, though–Marcantoni has had this heist all planned out for a while now–he was getting ready to pull it when the cops grabbed him for something else.  He’s pretty fixated on it. It’s in the nearby city–his hometown, Williams’ as well (they never met before, for reasons that shouldn’t need explaining).  He needs a large string to pull this one off, and he wants Parker and Williams to join–which means sticking around a while after they break prison.  That’s his price for taking a chance on escaping with two strangers–a show of good faith, you might say.  Neither of them likes it–Parker least of all–but they need a third man.  They agree.

Jelinek, the rat, doesn’t miss much in the world he’s chosen for himself.  He’s one of those people who are good at prison.

Walter Jelinek was a man, but he looked like a car, the kind of old junker car that had been in some bad accidents so that now the frame is bent, the wheels don’t line up any more, the whole vehicle sags to one side and pulls to that side, and the brakes are oatmeal.  Half the original body is gone, the paint job is some amateur brushwork, and there’s duct tape over the taillights.  That was Walter Jelinek, who Mackey had told Parker not to talk to, since he had a reputation for carrying tales to teacher, but now Jelinek on his own wanted to talk to Parker.

He’s been seeing these three mismatched men keeping company, over by the weightlifting area–he tells Parker he knows they’re planning a break, and he wants to join.  Parker knows he’s lying–he wants to sell them to the authorities.  But Jelinek has to be handled gently–until it’s time to leave.  Then he’ll be handled a bit more roughly.

Parker got some information about the prison layout from Mackey, and he knows their only way out is through the library–there’s a locked door there that leads into a hallway that ultimately leads to a fenced-in parking lot for personnel.  It’s not enough information, but he gets more when Turley calls him in for another meeting, and Parker get marched down that very hallway–this time he’s memorizing every twist and turn.

As in past encounters, he gets more out of Turley than Turley gets out of him (one thing to talk a good game about game theory, another to know when you’re the one being played)–he realizes that Jelinek has already made some vague noises about him and the others–but nothing specific, not enough to act on, because he wants to get something out of the bosses (a softer prison to retire to)–and the bosses, through Turley, are trying to see if they can get it themselves, so Jelinek gets nothing (nobody likes a rat).  Turley really tips his hand when he tells Parker nobody’s ever escaped from Stoneveldt.

All this means to Parker is that he and his crew have very little time now–in a few days, they’ll be moved to different floors, and the whole thing’s off.  It also means, as Marcantoni helpfully points out, that Jelinek needs to die.  Parker didn’t need to be told that.

Parker gives the word–Thursday at 5:00pm.  Prisoners on their tier can use the library from 2:15 to 4:45 (nobody is let in after 4:15).  To pass the time, or pretend to themselves they’re coming up with some brilliant legal defense, whatever works for them.

Jelinek is reading a magazine in the game room, all by himself.  Parker acts as if he’s ready to talk about the escape.  Well, it’s a kind of escape.  He chokes Jelinek slowly, with one hand, while Williams and Marcantoni provide cover.  But he doesn’t want an obvious strangulation.  So once he’s got Jelinek subdued, he breaks his neck.  They cover him with a few blankets and head for the library.  It’s been a while since we’ve seen Parker kill somebody with one of those hands of his.  One weapon that can’t be confiscated at the gate.

They get into the library just before the cut-off time, each entering separately.  The state provides legal volunteers there, law students mainly, to work with the prisoners on their cases.  Pro Bono, you know?   And as soon as the moment is right, Marcantoni grabs the one remaining volunteer by his necktie, and headbutts him, hard.

What follows is a tutorial in psychological intimidation that any interrogation expert on the other side of the law would be forced to grudgingly admire.  Williams plays good cop, telling Jim, the volunteer (never volunteer) that he doesn’t want anybody hurt, but damn, these two other guys he’s with, you just do not want to irritate them, Jim.  He’s going to do whatever they say, and he hopes Jim will do the same.  Jim is all ears.

What they need Jim to do is very simple.  He calls in some guards to help carry out some heavy law books.  They’ll do everything else.  Nobody will have a gun.  Nobody will get killed.  Williams tells Jim he saw the organ donor card in his wallet.  That’s an admirable thing to do, man.  But you don’t want to do it sooner than you have to.  Jim decides he’s not ready to be an organ donor yet.

Chance favors the prepared felon.  The two guards that come in are both races.  Armed with blunt objects scavenged from their surroundings, Parker’s crew renders them both equally unconscious.  Parker will dress in Jim’s clothes–much too tight, and the guard uniforms won’t fit Marcantoni and Williams perfectly either, but the sheer tedium of routine will render the other guards unobservant of such minor details.

And they just walk out the door leading to the parking lot.  And right at that moment, as planned, Mackey is waiting with a van marked State Corrections ID.  He doesn’t get all the way in the gate, but he doesn’t have to.  The three escapees throw down the books and file boxes, and jump into the getaway car.  In the confusion, whoever was on the gate started it closing–and by the time they get it open again, Parker and his associates are off in the wind.  Free as a bird.

Well, no.  It’s not that easy.  It’s never that easy.  This is just Part One of a four part novel.  There’s still a heist to be pulled.  Parker still needs to get out of this flat featureless state, back to New Jersey, back to Claire.  And on his way back, he will find himself imprisoned again and again, forced to keep devising new ways to break out.  Until it seems like every prison door simply leads to another kind of prison.  It might have been simpler, and quite certainly safer, for him to serve his time–maybe make a deal, if that really was an option.

Why didn’t he?  Because he couldn’t.  Because imprisonment wasn’t a viable state of being for him.  Not for him.  You see the two longer passages up top.  Westlake wrote them both around the same time, though only the one from this novel was published in his lifetime.  Both times he was remembering that brief imprisonment he himself endured, the torment of it, the horror of it.  And even after he learned from real convicts that you get used to it, that it becomes your normal everyday waking reality, he wondered–what would that mean?  What would you have become, after making that mental adjustment?  How could those scars ever heal?  How could you ever be yourself again?

What would Parker be, after serving years in prison?  Well, he might be John Dortmunder, as we met him at the beginning of The Hot Rock.  That’s where Westlake chose to open that saga of an alternate universe version of Parker–a man broken down by long and repeated imprisonment, walking with a slouch, cowed, fatalistic, a sad sack, one of life’s losers.  His spirit broken.  Yes, he gets it back, now and again, defies the odds, defies authority, gets his own back with interest.  But the damage done to him is permanent.  He can rally, rise to a challenge, but he can never truly escape.

It would be permanent for Parker as well.  Possibly much worse.  Assuming Parker could go on living at all.  Lobo didn’t.  Some people can bear imprisonment–some can even rise above it, like Mandela–and some, like Walter Jelinek, seem almost born for it, not broken so much as trained, assimilated.  But a wolf can’t recite Invictus to himself, find freedom in some sanctum of his self-captained soul.  For some creatures in this world, there is only freedom or oblivion–nothing in-between.

But life is always looking for ways to take that from us.  It can come in many different forms, imprisonment.  As it came to Westlake, while he was working on this book.

Breakout came about when I realized that, in all these years, Parker had never been jailed except once before the first book. Get him arrested, and watch how he handled it. At the end of part one he’s out of jail, but not out of trouble, and at that point I came down with bad Lyme disease, in the hospital four days, unable to work for six weeks, and I kept saying, ”Well, at least he’s out of jail.“ We both hated the experience, and we both worked very hard to get him out of there. When I got back to the book, I realized the title meant the whole book so the entire thing is Parker clawing himself out of places he doesn’t want to be. They usually find their subject and their path that way, and if they don’t I simply give up writing, move to another city and use a different name.

I’ve never had Lyme disease, but I had pneumonia once.  You know what that’s like?  Like drowning inside your own body.  Afterwards, I found out there’s a vaccine, that you only need to get twice in your life.  I highly recommend it.  But I still remember those  days I struggled against my confinement, flailing endlessly for the surface, my lungs bursting, knowing that I’d either win free or die.

Lyme disease creeps up on you stealthily, like the bloodsucking bastards that carry it. Stands to reason Westlake was already sick for much if not all of the time he was writing Part One.

And here’s the suggestion I’ll leave you with, before we go to the break, and I get to work on Part 2.   This is a solid Parker novel–it has some problems, a few false notes, a few minor mistakes, a few questions I don’t think it answers to my full satisfaction, and I wouldn’t rank it quite as highly as the best of the Final Eight, let alone the First Sixteen.

But Part One is as Stark as Stark gets.  I can’t find anything wrong with it.  I’d stack it against anything Westlake ever wrote under that name, or any other.  And he wrote much of it while he was progressively struggling with a disease, an insidious spirochete that breaks you down, physically and mentally, as the pneumonia broke me.

And he’s writing as well as he ever wrote in his life while this is happening to him.  For as long as he’s able to write at all.  And what this says to  me is that when a complex system begins to break down, it’s the most basic parts of it that are the last to fail.  And Westlake was writing as Stark.  And that tells me Stark is the core identity, the foundation on which everything else was built.

He couldn’t have written so well as Westlake in that condition, or any of his other personas.  Beautiful as they are, truthful as they are, valuable as they are, they are still peripheral, ancillary.  But when he felt the grip of the disease tightening around his throat–like one of Parker’s huge veiny hands–well, Dr. Johnson did say it concentrates the mind wonderfully.  And the mind was Stark.  So is Life, in case you hadn’t noticed.  Until we break out.

(Part of Friday’s Forgotten Books)

First Read: Forever And A Death

The last Donald E. Westlake novel ever published.  Is what this is going down as.  Whatever its merits as a book may be, that one quality eclipses all others.  If you, like me, have developed a habit, worked your way through everything else on the list, once you’ve read this one, it’s over.  No more Westlake.  Okay, there’s sleaze paperbacks of variously dubious provenance, there’s uncollected short stories, there’s nonfiction articles, and there’s an archive in Boston you could visit under close guard, or possibly break into late at night; rather fitting, when you think about it.   But really.  This is it.

So is it any good?  To the true completist, this question can seem fairly inconsequential.  Mr. Westlake wrote far too many books for all of them to be polished gems, and he knew that better than anyone.  That so many of them are good, and often much more than that,  attests to his abilities, but I’d say an even more telling testimonial is how avidly many of us read even his less distinguished work, because on his very worst day he was capable of producing unique thought-provoking stories, and the more we read, the better we understand him.  His failures often tell us more than his successes.  But this, I would say, is neither.   Or maybe it’s both.  Somewhere in between.

I’m not here to review it this time, because first of all, I never review a Westlake novel I haven’t read at least twice.  The way I review these books is to take them apart, piece by piece, looking in depth at the story and characters, typing out quote after quote, so that (I like to think) if all copies of that book were to disappear, you could get a pretty good feeling for it just from my review.

I have said in the past that nobody should come here and read my reviews if they haven’t read the books first.  Well, hardly anyone has read this one, because it isn’t on sale until June.  I got an advance reviewer’s copy from Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime.  I will not abuse that confidence.  Not until several months after the book comes out.  Not until you at least have been given the option of reading it.  I mean, it’s not going to be much of a discussion if it’s just me and Greg Tulonen, and Greg hasn’t read the edited for publication version yet, I don’t think.

The sole point of getting an advance copy (other than impatience) is to write a review, so that people can decide whether or not they want to read the book.  That’s never really been what TWR is about, since if you’re here, you’re already hooked.  You don’t need me to tell you a new Westlake is a big deal.  You don’t need me to decide what books you want to buy.  But you might still be interested in what I think.  God knows why.

Let me talk first about the actual physical volume, which is what I read.  A glossy paperback, eight inches high, five across, and one thick.  463 pages, but just 435 of those are the book itself, so it’s not his longest novel by any means.  Westlake’s original 610 page manuscript has been trimmed down by about 10%, according to Ardai–mainly repetitive material, descriptions of restaurants, some local history relating to the various settings.  Things that needed to be more fully digested into the narrative as a whole, and probably could have been if Westlake hadn’t been discouraged from doing any more work on the book, and if he’d had a sympathetic editor to work with.

There is a substantial and fascinating afterward from Jeff Kleeman, the producer who hired Westlake to write several story treatments for the project that eventually became Tomorrow Never Dies.  Because, as he tells us right upfront, he was as avid a fan of Westlake novels as he was of 007 yarns as a kid.  He wanted to see how the two would go together.  Better than one might think, not as well as one might hope, is the short answer.

I’d have bought this book just for his description of Westlake’s creative process, and this I absolutely must quote from.  If he ever gives up on this major motion picture producing gig, Mr. Kleeman would make a passing good book blogger.

I’m fascinated by how ideas take shape and how writers write.  Some writers outline extensively, some start with an ending and work backward, some write a bunch of scenes in no particular order and with no obvious connection and then eventually pick a few of the best and build a story around them.  None of these were Don’s method  He relied on what he called “narrative push.”

Don would get an idea, usually for a beginning, an opening scene, something like, “What if there’s a bank robbery in progress and the getaway car can’t find a parking space in front of the bank? (This was the idea Don said was the spark for writing the first of his Dortmunder novels.)  Don would start from a premise like that and just write, without any plan for where he was going, trusting that eventually he’d end up with a story.  He told me there was only one story he ever started that he couldn’t puzzle out a way to finish.  It involved insurance fraud and after six weeks Don realized he’d written his characters into such a tight corner he was unable to keep them moving all the way to a resolution.  I hope one day Hard Case Crime will unearth the manuscript and we’ll get to see Don’s version of an impossible story.

Pretty sure Mr. Westlake was referring to The Scared Stiff, which he started writing after he finished The Ax, put aside, then published under a pseudonym in 2002, and I’ll be unearthing my copy soon enough so I can review it.  That’s about insurance fraud, and it’s another one of his books he was sort of cordially advised not to proceed with by people he trusted, because it wasn’t what people expected of him.   Maybe he was talking about an earlier attempt in this vein, but the dates match up pretty well, and how many insurance fraud novels was he going to write?

So as Kleeman explains, he loved the ideas Westlake came up with, and some were used in the finished film.  Most significantly, Pierce Brosnan owed Mr. Westlake a drink for getting to work with Michelle Yeoh, because it was Westlake’s idea that Bond partner with a female Chinese agent, work with her and then play of course, because Bond James Bond and Westlake Donald Westlake.

But once it became clear that Goldeneye, Mr. Kleeman’s first Bond, was a hit that had given new life to the franchise, and the studio wanted to move ahead fast with the next one, the scheduling got tight, and Westlake’s process didn’t work so well when you didn’t already know in advance exactly what the story would be (like an adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel). Kleeman also mentions Westlake’s well known aversion to adapting his own work, which I think was not because he lacked objectivity, but because he didn’t want to mutilate his own children at the passing whims of some suits in Burbank.

They couldn’t know how well his Bond concepts would work until he’d turned them into a script using narrative push, and if the script didn’t work, it’d be too late to try again, and pre-production costs would keep accumulating.  So that’s why Westlake didn’t write the screenplay for Tomorrow Never Dies, and if you look closely at what we’re being told here, you can see why he never really clicked as a screenwriter, except on very specific types of projects, where his process could be made to work.  A writer on a studio picture is not a freelance artist for hire.  He’s a (very well paid) cog in a machine.  Ask Faulkner and Fitzgerald, neither of whom ever wrote a decent script in their lives.  (Ever see Land of the Pharaohs?) 

So there’s plenty more from Kleeman, and it’s all worth reading, but that’s just the dessert.  The book is the main course, and the book came about because Westlake had developed this idea that he knew the producers wouldn’t use, and he felt like it had potential.  There was no script, but there was a treatment he could turn into a novel.

He’d done something like this before, twice.  First time with Who Stole Sassi Manoon?, where the film had never been made, and he’d retained the rights.  That was probably his weakest novel–I think there actually was a finished script there, and he’d been taking a lot of notes from the producers no doubt, and trying to tailor it to the rather puerile standards of Mid-60’s light comedy.   It was probably not a strong script to begin with, and he struggled getting it to work as a book, but good bet it was better than the movie would have been.

Second time, he wrote the original screenplay for Cops and Robbers, which was turned into a modestly decent 70’s comedy/thriller, but he thought the director, a former film editor, just didn’t know how to be the boss of everybody, and the many good scenes in it just kind of lie there, instead of jumping off the screen at you.

He’d retained the rights to novelize his screenplay, and he did, and the result was one of his best and most original heist books, very focused and unconventional in its approach.  Much better than the film, which thankfully flopped, so that people who read the book wouldn’t have the masterful plot twists spoiled for them.  You do see a certain incompatibility of interests between Mr. Westlake and Hollywood at times, but they both got something out of the relationship, which is why it never really ended.

So this was his third attempt to turn a film into a book, but unlike the previous two, it wasn’t in the heist genre.  And he was told, respectfully but firmly, by people whose input he valued, that it just wouldn’t sell–which might have been true–and that it didn’t have the patented Westlake touch with regards to character and story–a reaction I can understand, while still not agreeing with it.

It has most of what we read him for, other than his humor, which is on the down low here, and for good reason. But at many points, and particularly in the early chapters, it feels like a preliminary sketch that needs to be filled in.  Well, a preliminary sketch by a famous artist can sell for millions at auction.  Isn’t Donald E. Westlake a famous artist?  And what’s the one thing all famous artists have in common?  Their work gets more valuable after they die.

Honestly, if he had filled it in, he still might not have gotten to publish it.  He’d already had his shot at making this general type of book work, several times. One was Ex Officio, a political thriller, longer and much less action-packed than this, written under the pseudonym Timothy J. Culver (the only one of Westlake’s pseudonyms he publicly killed off, in a mock panel discussion between his most famous literary personas).   I assume that did decent sales, since it was reprinted in paperback–but under the title Power Play, so probably nothing stellar.  It’s also a better book than this–a finished work.  He had good editorial relationships at M. Evans & Co., where many of his best books under his own name would later be published.

He wrote Kahawa under his own name, but I rather suspect Culver had a hand in it, the rumors of his death being much exaggerated.  That was for Viking, where he had terrible editorial relationships, and very little support.  That was at least outwardly a heist story, close enough to his usual fictive haunts that he could get away with making most of it about Africa, about Africans of all races, about various merry wars between the sexes, about brutal venal dictators and those who serve them, about the way we in the west look the other way when it comes to human rights abuses in the third world, because there’s so much money to be made there.  And about identity, because everything he wrote was about that.   It was a book he could be justly proud of.  And it sold like purest shit.

When you write the kind of book that’s supposed to be a best seller, at least close to it–and it isn’t–you are damaging your own professional profile.  As true in publishing as in the movies–you’re only as good as your last project.  Perhaps feeling encouraged by the extraordinary success of The Ax, he wanted to try once more to break out of the confines of what people thought he was.

He’d tried that back in the 80’s with the book that became The Comedy is Finished (again about a celebrity kidnapping, but no comic capering this time), and that became the second novel of his to be published after his death.

Though many disagree, I think it’s one of the best books he ever wrote, a searing look at the political and generational divide in America that existed a long time before the internet and social media, and not just at Woodstock.  And I don’t know it would have done any better than Kahawa if it had been published back when it was written.  Westlake in this vein has a problem–he’s too commercial for the intellectuals, and too damn smart for the people who just want a good read.  (Honestly, sometimes I think he’s too smart for the intellectuals as well.  They’re like “Who does this guy  think he is?”  Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?)

Memory, written in the early 60’s, was his one attempt at a book that didn’t fit any commercial cubbyhole at all, and it’s a dark brooding masterpiece that can haunt you for weeks after reading it, and we’ll never know how many more like that he might have had in him, or whether it would have been worth losing all the books we know him for to find out.   But knowing he had the potential to write that, we can’t help but wonder.

Writers build their own ghettos and live in them.  Westlake wrote genre books, books with a defined audience, never a very large one, but never too small either.  He couldn’t try to write The Great American Novel, as Philip Roth literally did, and it turned out to be about baseball, and it’s not that great, but it’s American.  And a novel.  If Westlake had his agent submit something different to some highbrow publisher like Knopf or FarrarStraussGiroux, what reaction would he get?  “Oh yes, the Dortmunder fellow, very droll, did this get into the wrong envelope somehow?”  Far easier for the highbrow author to explore the genre slums, and so many have, but it rarely works out.  Grass is always greener.

He doesn’t want to let this Bond story he slaved over, did more than his usual amount of research on, go to waste.  And there’s a larger problem he has been trying to crack for ages now, how to write an interesting long novel that isn’t a mystery, and will sell.  This is a story he wrote for James Freakin’ Bond, which should make it commercially viable.  But it can’t be about James Freakin’ Bond.  For obvious legal considerations, but also personal ones.  If you want my honest opinion, Westlake never believed in Bond.  He enjoyed the movies, maybe even some of the novels (I’m guessing there was a lot of tongue-clucking and eye-rolling when he read Fleming), but he never believed in any of it.

Not because of the gadgets, or the glamor, or the girls, or the utter disregard for gravity, but because Bond is an Organization Man.  He’s the Organization Man.  He can twit his superiors from now ’til Doomsday (which in his world comes every other week).   Doesn’t mean a thing.  He puts on a suit, and he goes to the office, and he flirts with the secretary, and he does what he’s told.  He kills on command.  He’s not a Westlake hero.  He never could be.  Doesn’t mean he’s not interesting.  He’s interesting the way Batman is interesting (and Westlake liked Batman too, almost wrote for the comic once).  But you know who’d be much more interesting to Donald E. Westlake than Bond himself?  Bond villains.

The thing about Westlake heroes is that none of them are, really.  Heroes.  Oh there are exceptions, but always very qualified and somewhat self-conscious ones, and even in those stories, the bad guys are usually a lot more interesting.  The characters we remember Westlake for are thieves, killers, cads, rogues, rascals.  Plus the occasional befuddled naif, picaresquely stumbling into adulthood.  Hard Cases, for the most part (hey, bloggers can do product placement too).

So when these villainous heroes (heroic villains?), who know themselves, come up against out-and-out villains who don’t, the result is predictable.  But suppose ordinary decent people, with considerable courage and some applicable skills, but absolutely no experience with the cloak and dagger shtik, came up against someone who is, for want of a better word, evil–and brilliant–and filthy rich.  And he’s got a plan.  That will make him still richer, and a whole lot of people dead.  A Bond story with a Bond villain–but no Bond.

No SMERSH or SPECTRE either, because Westlake would feel, and rightly so I think, that the most interesting Bond villains in the best stories all worked for themselves.  Auric Goldfinger.  Hugo Drax.  Francisco Scaramanga.  Blofeld was more interesting as a figure lurking Sauron-like in the shadows than as an active antagonist.  Who is this guy?  What’s his motivation?  World domination?  Pfaugh.  No evil scheme Blofeld irrationally blabbed to 007 before once again failing to kill him ever resonated half so well as Goldfinger’s epic rant–

(I can imagine Westlake standing up and applauding, which might have gotten him some odd looks in the theater, but he’d be used to that.)

Shakespeare knew the virtues of a great villain, and so did Lorenzo Da Ponte, and so did John Milton.   A villain of this type is a rebel, after all.  Somebody who refuses to bow to the established order of things.    It may be necessary to thwart him or her, but we can still appreciate the ingenuity of the scheme, the audacity of ambition that inspired it.

Of all Bond villains, Goldfinger is the only one 007 personally compliments.  He’s as delighted with the genius on display as any of us are.  As we are delighted by the fictional Richard III, or Iago.  While still knowing they must, in the end, be done to death.  Though Westlake was notorious for having his villainous protagonists get away with all kinds of things, up to and including the social destruction of an entire anti-social planet.  (See, not even going to give you that much of a spoiler.)

Anarchaos may well be the book most similar to this one in the Westlake canon, and that’s no accident.  Curt Clark is very much in the mix here as well, though this one doesn’t have the noir atmosphere, the hard-bitten first person narrator, ala Hammett.  The name of the villain here is Richard Curtis.  Richard, for Richard Stark.  Curtis, for Curt Clark.  And just as Rolf Malone used carefully placed explosive charges to put an end to the world that murdered his brother–well, that would be telling.

(Editing this in much later–Richard Curtis was the real-life name of a writer and literary agent Westlake would have been acquainted with, from his days writing sleaze paperbacks.  So maybe Stark and Clark were in his mind, but methinks I didst assume too much.)

So Richard Stark is here, and Timothy J. Culver, and Curt Clark.  I can’t for the life of me detect any Tucker Coe.  The whimsy of Westlake is mainly missing, and I think that’s perhaps at least partly why people who read the manuscript complained that it wasn’t like him.  Of course, he wasn’t planning to publish it as a Westlake.  Knox Burger, his agent of the time, said in a letter Greg Tulonen read, that he was confounded by the pseudonym Westlake had suggested using.  I find myself wondering if the pseudonym might have been Richard Curtis.  Same way the Samuel Holt novels are accredited to Samuel Holt.  The fact that Curtis isn’t the narrator argues against that.  But somehow, one would like to know.

He wanted so much to not have to be Westlake all the time.  To get away from the established perceptions of him as a writer, to be free of that burden of expectations.  The publishing industry simply couldn’t accommodate him in this way any more.  So he put the book aside, and while it’s a finished work, I think we have to say that it’s also an unpolished one.  But in many ways, that just makes it more interesting, to those of us who want to better understand his creative process, and how he was able to write so much, so well, and so multifariously.

I read the early chapters with a slight sense of disappointment.   Then the pace began to build.  I found myself turning the pages faster, needing to know the outcome.  I felt the book was out of balance in some ways, but I wondered if maybe that was the point.  There are many protagonists here, some more interesting than others, none entirely good or evil, all imperfectly knowing themselves, though the two most clearly heroic characters both end up knowing themselves better as the story goes on.  Two of the protagonists are gay, and a couple–and two of the most serious obstacles to Curtis’s plans.  Not comic relief this time.  Well, there is no comic relief this time.

There is an Oddjob, though.  That was maybe the thing I found most fascinating.  We spend quite a lot of time in his head. Westlake must have really liked Goldfinger (he probably got the idea for The Green Eagle Score from it, and greatly improved on it).   Essentially, the improbable and largely mindless henchmen one finds in a Bond story are rationalized here, given souls and motivations and inner lives, comprehensible pragmatic reasons for their loyalty to the main villain (who feels no loyalty to anyone but himself).  But nobody gets to decapitate anybody else with a bowler hat.  Oh well.  Can’t have everything.

Anything else I might say?  Not yet.  Let me read it again, and a while after you’ve all had the opportunity to appreciate what this book has to offer, we’ll come back to it.  And decide how high to rank it.  I honestly don’t think I’ll place it as high as the other two unpublished works we’ve seen since Westlake’s death.  But I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it outsells both of them.  We’ll see.

And there is a message to it, I think.  Aside from the identity puzzles one always finds in Westlake.  It would read something along the lines of “There are real Bond villains in this ever-changing world in which we live in.  But there is no James Bond.  It’s up to us to stop them.  Or join them.  Or be destroyed and/or ruled by them.  There are no other choices.”

Review: Put A Lid On It, Part 2

“Meehan,” Woody said, “what the hell have you got to do with the president?”

“They want me to steal something for him,” Meehan said.   “He’s got an evidence problem, just like a normal person, like you or me, and he needs a robber, so they look in the federal can, they find me, make me the offer.  I get this evidence, turn it over, they make my case go away, they can do that.  Next week I’m supposed to go to juvenile court, plead guilty, sentenced to time served.”

Woody frowned at him.  Down inside there, he seemed to be thinking very hard, but not very fast.  Finally he said, “How long I known you?”

“Maybe seven, eight years.”

“Here’s the thing of it,” Woody said.  “What you just told me there is the rankest bullshit, I wouldn’t try that one on my four-year-old nephew, but it’s comin outa you, and while you contain as much bullshit as anybody it isn’t that kind of bullshit, not in all the years I known you.  It just doesn’t have the mark of your kind of invention, and why would you try such bullshit on me in the first place?  What’s in it for you?  You aren’t trying to entrap me, not with a story like that, you aren’t making me any offers, so what is this shit?”

“Well, it’s the truth,” Meehan said.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Woody said.  “If it isn’t the truth, what the fuck is it?  You can buy me that beer now.”

“Wouldn’t you describe yourself as antisocial?”

“Anti?”  He was surprised, but not offended; she just didn’t understand yet.  “I’m not against society,” he said.  “I need it.  Just like you do, or anybody else.  I got no objection to society at all.  I do try to keep out of its way.”

“And what?” she asked him, “do you see as your position in society?”

He couldn’t resist.  Hoping to achieve a boyish grin and a shrug, he said, “Usually, on a fire escape.”

For its author, this book was about three things:

1)Creating a (somewhat) more grounded version of the type of character Westlake had written about for decades, under several different names.  An unaffiliated operator who steals for a living, and has a network of fellow independents he can call upon to pull jobs too big for one guy.  Less invincible than Parker, less improbably multi-talented than Grofield, less fatalistic than Dortmunder, and more inwardly reflective than any of them.

2)Satirizing American electoral politics, and suggesting that the people who run electoral campaigns are in a poor position to call anybody else dishonest, as are most of their candidates–so use them, as opposed to letting them use you.  Not a revolutionary so much as an evolutionary message–wise up, voters.  Just because you dance with somebody doesn’t mean you have to go to bed, or (even worse) fall in love with your partner.  But you’re going to need to dance with somebody.

3)Telling a story about a guy who had already figured out who he was, what he wanted to do with his life–but then decided to strike off in a new direction.  Not forgetting what he used to be, but rather finding something new to do with the same talents and proclivities he’s always had, something with more of a future to it, and that decision comes with a smart interesting woman into the bargain (a recurrent theme in Westlake’s work, because the boy can’t help it).

That last story is out of O. Henry, of course.  A Retrieved Reformation, where Jimmy Valentine, the master safecracker, meets the love of his life, goes straight for her, never telling anyone what he used to be, and then one day he’s going to give his tools to a fellow cracksman (his reformation doesn’t mean he thinks everybody else has to reform–his personal choice), and then suddenly has to use them to save a child from asphyxiating in a bank vault.

This cop who’s been tracking him has Jimmy dead to rights, and he gives himself up, believing his new life has come to an end, along with his freedom.  But the detective, who saw what Jimmy just did, addresses him by his new name, and tells him his buggy’s waiting. It’s a beautiful story.  And that’s all it is.  In the real world, that cop would have clapped on the bracelets in a heartbeat.  Cops never reform of being cops, just like politicians never reform of being politicians.  And both have their uses, but you need to know this about them if you want to stay in the free and clear.  You must understand the nature of the beast if you want to make it work for you.  And you must understand yourself as well.

And say what you will about Francis Xavier Meehan, he knows himself very well indeed, but he’s never had much occasion to know anything about politics or its practitioners up to now.  He’s getting what you might call a crash course.  Released from a Federal prison, where he was looking at life behind bars, he’s been told all charges will be dropped if he obtains a videotape that could derail the reelection hopes of the incumbent President, if it’s released just before the election.

It’s being kept at the home of a rich supporter of the other party’s nominee, and reluctant though he was to pull this job, he suddenly got interested when told this gentleman, one Clendon Burnstone IV, also has a very fine collection of antique firearms.  Meehan’s interest only increased when he found out the fence he typically uses is well-familiar with this collection, would be delighted to get his hands on it.

Pat Jeffords and Bruce Benjamin, the two campaign organizers he’s making this deal with, are scandalized by his insistence on performing this ancillary theft-for-profit.  Why, that’s larceny!  Meehan gently informs them that’s what they were already asking him to do, and their intentions are just as guilty as his.  They take a little while to process this.

The other side will be releasing the tape very soon now.  That gives Meehan very little time to work with, but quite a lot of leverage, and what he wants from that leverage is room to maneuver.  So in no time at all, he’s heading back to New York with his lawyer, Elaine Goldfarb, getting a room in a fleabag hotel near the Port Authority bus station, and pulling phone numbers of past accomplices out of his head (since one of his ten thousand rules is to never write anything down).

There’s a voicemail function on the hotel room phone, and a recurrent theme in the book is that he keeps coming back to the room, sees the red light blinking, and it’s never good news.  So he gets a message from Goldfarb, and he calls her back, and some man answers, tells him he should come over there now, and he’s pretty sure it’s not her boyfriend.  So he fakes his way past the doorman in Goldfarb’s upper west side apartment building by pretending to be installing a smoke alarm, and long story short, they had her handcuffed to the bathroom sink, she unscrewed the pipe, she got her gun, and she was going to shoot both of them, and they were presumably going to shoot back, and it would get very messy, and cops would show up to question the survivors.

With a flurry of desperate mime, he persuades her this is a bad idea (Meehan would rather steal guns than use them), and they sneak out of there, so he can let his handlers know what a brilliant job they’re doing with security.  Goldfarb gets a room at the same crappy hotel he’s in.  She is not happy about this, but it keeps her in the story, something Westlake had often found difficult to justify with The Girls in his Nephew books.  The Goldfarb, with her legal expertise and quirky rapport with Meehan, is somehow easier to keep in the mix, even though she wants to know noth-eeeeng about the robbery she understands is to be committed as the price of her client’s freedom.  “No details!” she keeps exclaiming, all through the story.

Goldfarb, who doesn’t impress easy, is gratified that Meehan came galloping over there to save her.  Though he does like her, his primary concern was to make sure this was nothing that could negatively impact his freedom, to which she is currently vital.  But on the other hand, it’s nice to have her look at him like he’s her hero, even though she was in the process of saving herself when he arrived.  So he never disillusions her.  If the relationship worked out, maybe he tells her on their Golden Anniversary, but I have my doubts.  Probably one of the ten thousand rules is “You don’t need to share everything.” One of the rules that gets you to that Golden Anniversary.  If Goldfarb didn’t agree, she wouldn’t keep saying no details.  Oh, and this is where she tells Meehan, “I find I prefer the Goldfarb without the Ms.”  So does Meehan.  Cute couple, huh?

So having rescued the maiden fair, or whatever, Meehan gets back to business, and manages to make contact with Woody, one of his erstwhile partners in crime, and having submitted to being searched for a wire, because Woody knows he was in federal custody, he persuades Woody he’s got a legit job to work, as you can see up top.  Woody’s a fun character.  Don’t get too attached.

Next he and Goldfarb meet with Jeffords, to find out what the hell happened that two not-very-nice guys, one with an Arab-sounding name and one with a Jewish-sounding name, are holed up Goldfarb’s apartment, apparently in hopes of having a serious conversation with Meehan about his current activities.  Jeffords has learned the answer to this question.  Remember how they used a campaign contributor’s private jet to transport Meehan to North Carolina?  The campaign contributor, named Arthur, found out about it.  And turns out he knows some other people he owes favors to besides the President.  Small world, huh?

When next he could speak, he said, “We now learn that Arthur, through various multinational business connections, has, what shall I say, divided loyalties.  Conflicts of interest.  There are other elements, offshore, about which he feels as strongly as he feels about the reelection of the President.  Perhaps more strongly.”  He looked uncomfortable, fiddled with his wineglass, said, “It seems there’s a combined Egyptian-Israeli task force in the country at the moment, attempting to influence the election.  Been here for months.  Spending money.”

Goldfarb said, “Foreign power brokers always try to horn in on our elections, guarantee themselves a piece of the pie.  It’s like lobbying.”

(I find myself wishing we’d nominated Goldfarb. Oh well.  She’s not dumb enough to accept, anyway.)

Goldfarb asks if they want to get their hands on the tape so they can release it, to which Jeffords says “They would merely like our President to be deeply in debt to them.  Let’s say, even more deeply in debt.”  Yeah.  Let’s say that.

So then it’s off to the races with Woody (just Meehan, since Goldfarb still doesn’t want any details).  More specifically, it’s off to rural Pennsylvania, which you might recall is was where the insane ex–POTUS of Ex Officio lived, fancy that.  They scope out the estate where the tape and the guns are, and they get a bit of luck–they can wander around the property more or less at will, because there’s a big campaign rally for the Presidential candidate Clendon Burstone IV is supporting.  Only it turns out not to be so lucky for Woody.

See, this guy ginning up the crowd with the usual conservative boilerplate (I told you there’s no way in hell Clendon Burnstone IV was supporting a Democrat) says something about how we must build more and better prisons.  Some heckler shouts from the crowd “What’s a better prison?”  And a horrified Meehan realizes the shout came from Woody.  Oh God.  He’s developing a social conscience.  At the worst possible juncture in time and space.  Isn’t anybody besides Meehan immune from this shit?

What follows is a spirited if perhaps simplistic debate, regarding the pros and cons (heh) of rehabilitation.  At one point the speaker, seeing a white person at a conservative rally, and still using the standard code words for non-white minorities, yells “Don’t waste sympathy on those animals!  We’ve got to be tough on them!”  To which Woody responds “Tough?  You think you’re tough?  The joints I’ve been in, you wouldn’t last five minutes!”

Yeah.  He’s gone.

Now I’m a liberal born and bred, so obviously I think Woody wins the debate.  So did Westlake, as you’d only need to read Help I Am Being Held Prisoner to know.  But when winning the debate means being led away in cuffs, I think you have to say the victory is of the Pyrrhic sort.  Woody has outstanding warrants on him, so he’s not going to be working for a while.  Meehan sort of rolls his eyes, finds an unlocked vehicle with the keys in it, and drives away.  Back to the old drawing board.

There’s a message from Goldfarb waiting for him at the hotel.  She’s back in her apartment now, but she found out her phone is bugged. Meehan calls Jeffords again.  He sighs, says he’ll work on it, but what can you do on a Sunday?  Meehan calls Goldfarb back, tells her the bugs may be there a little longer.  She says what the hell, her mom’s been kvetching about how she never calls.  Yehudi and Mostafa can listen to an hour of the Jewish Mother Channel.  “Revenge is sweet,” says Meehan.  They’re bonding.

(Sidebar: Perhaps you think Westlake is just being his usual far-fetched farcical self by positing an Israeli-Egyptian team of spies working somewhat against U.S. interests–as I must confess I did at first.  And, as is usually the case, he’s smarter than us.)

Meehan’s memorized list of phone numbers for guys who might want to pull a nice friendly little heist now and again is reaching its end.  Many of the numbers don’t work anymore, or somebody he doesn’t know picks up, or it turns out the guy is in prison, or dead, or worst of all, leading an  honest life.  (Westlake’s drawing on the short story You Put On Some Weight, aka Fresh Out of Prison, that he published in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in 1960, which later appeared in The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution.)

But he finally finds an active heister, name of Bernie, and meets him in Queens, at Atomic Lanes (a bowling alley that was built after the A-Bomb, but before Americans realized somebody might drop one on them too).  Bernie, whose physical description sounds fairly similar to Westlake’s (skinny, quick-moving, mostly bald with pepper-and-salt steel wool around the edges) is amenable to stealing some rich guy’s guns, why not?  Having arranged to drive back out to Pennsylvania with Bernie the next day, Meehan meets a woman named Mona at the bar there, and heads off for a one night stand.  Goldfarb is still just his lawyer.  I never said this was a storybook romance.

And this time they get really lucky.  At the structure outside the main house, which Meehan suspected was where the guns would be, they meet this old man, skinny, refined accent (almost but not-quite English), dressed mainly in white, with tan Docksiders.   I thought WASPs weren’t allowed to wear white after Labor Day, but I guess if you’re rich enough you can get a dispensation. He talks a lot.  He knows everything about old guns and the Revolutionary War, except maybe why it was actually fought.  Yep.  He’s Burnstone.  And he thinks they’re with the campaign.  You know, the other campaign.

So they learn everything they could possibly want to know, except the location of the tape, which Meehan figures is probably hidden there in the same room with the guns.  Bernie does a great job sounding like he’s interested in what the old man has to say, on history and politics, while inwardly seething at his patrician airs.  Here’s a random sampling of vintage Burnstone tone.  He’s explaining why he’d allow a rally for a candidate he’s only supporting to get a tax loophole passed to be held on his property.

“Mingling with the lower orders,” he said.  “What I normally do with the great unwashed is mostly leave them to themselves.  Unwashed they most certainly are, but what makes them great I will never understand.”

Perhaps reading Mencken a bit selectively, but doesn’t everyone?  By the time they bid Mr. Burnstone (oh damn, Westlake watched The Simpsons!) farewell, Bernie would almost be willing to rob him blind for free, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.  They meet two guys named Grassmore and Greedley (I couldn’t find those exact names on this database of authors I have access to, but I found Grassmuck and Greedy).  These are the actual two campaign guys Burnstone mistook Meehan and Bernie for.  Having been told the old man’s gone off on one of his rants about mouth-breathers they prudently decide to come back another time.  They mention in passing that nobody in his immediate family can stand to be around him either.

But as they drive back to New York, Meehan has an epiphany–see the problem with this job is that Burnstone is there all the time.  They need him to be gone in order to pull the job without bloodshed (sorely as Bernie is tempted).  How to achieve this?

He had confided to them his feelings of deep frustration that due to tawdry electoral concerns, he was not permitted to get up on a platform behind a podium and speak his mind, such as it is.

They go back, and tell him there’s this event they have planned, for a group called the Friends of the American Revolution (FAR)–a group formed for people who would have been on our side if they’d gotten here before the shooting was over.  Just good solid folks of northern European stock, none of that Ellis Island riff-raff you understand, and they’d love to hear you talk some good solid common sense Americanism to them, Mr. Burnstone.  EX-cellent!  Said event to occur on the day of the heist.  Problem solved, but now they need a limo to pick him up, and a chauffeur, complete with uniform and a cap to tip.

Then he returns once more to a message from Goldfarb, who needs to talk about his upcoming meet with Judge T. Joyce Foote, from Juvenile Court, who is supposed to remand him to Goldfarb’s custody, but could if she so chose make things difficult.  They need to meet and talk about protocol.  Plus she wants him to buy her dinner.  Meehan suggests this Caribbean place in the Village, that makes this great dish out of ‘goat elbow.’  That’s what he calls it.  It could very well be this Caribbean place in the Village.  Meehan the Foodie.  Who knew?  Well, his creator the foodie, obviously.

Goldfarb likes the goat elbow, but the restaurant is too noisy, so they chat as they walk down the winding side streets of  the Village.  This ends up feeling romantic, which confuses Meehan, because firstly he’s not the least bit romantic, and secondly this is Goldfarb, and she’s still his lawyer, but nonetheless he thinks to himself that if she wasn’t he’d probably be making a pass at her, though the glasses might get in the way.

She’s bent on lecturing him about how to behave around a judge so as not to get the usual reaction he gets out of judges.  Of course, this will be the first time (in his adult life, anyway) he’s ever been presented to a judge as a Person In Need of Supervision, legalese for a minor.  He wants to know why Judge Foote won’t just take one look at the 42 year old man in front of her and throw him the hell out of her courtroom.

“Chambers,” Goldfarb said.  “I wouldn’t parade you in juvenile court, believe me.  And no, she won’t boot it back, because she will see that everybody else, including people with more sway and import than her or anybody else in juvenile court has already signed off on it.  And that’s when I explain there are other humanitarian reasons for this special treatment, or perhaps you’re just a major turncoat about to testify against everybody in the world.  We’ll shade between superfink and a wasting disease without getting specific about anything, because we don’t have to get specific.  Are you following me?”

“No,” Meehan said.

“All right, fine,” she said.  “Your job, in front of Judge Foote, is to look hangdog but shifty, which I think you can do, and maybe toss in a little physical weakness as well.  Answer questions briefly.  Volunteer nothing.”

“I have volunteered nothing,” Meehan told her, “every day of my life.”

So they reach Seventh Avenue, and grab a cab back to their respective abodes, Meehan’s a little bummed the walk is over.  The Village can do that to a person, and apparently so can Goldfarb.

So back to the job–they need a third man, somebody to drive the limo that will convey both Clendon Burnston IV and his entire domestic staff away from the estate to a fictive political rally composed entirely of admiring Nordics.  Bernie’s got a guy.  Bob Clarence, who owns a chauffeur’s uniform, which he uses when he’s driving for a heist.  Cops just look at him idling there at the curb by a bank, and figure he’s supposed to be there.  Which as far as he’s concerned, he is.   Good driver, not jumpy, and best of all–he’s black.  Mr. Burnstone will be so pleased.  Bob won’t.

So Meehan has to go meet him, without Bernie (who doesn’t like to drive into The City, even though he lives in Queens), and there’s a bit of a sizing up process at this garage at 125th and Amsterdam, which it turns out Bob owns (useful way to hide his heisting profits).   He’s of an equivalent age set to Meehan, they share many similar life experiences, and they mainly get along fine, but Bob doesn’t like the idea of taking some old guy for a ride and just abandoning him.  Mean.  Meehan expresses his sincere conviction that after driving him for a few hours, Bob will be resisting the urge to run this particular old guy down with the limo.   “Anti-black, you mean?” Bob asks.  “Clendon Burnstone IV doesn’t fine-tune,” Meehan responds.  They have Chinese.  Bob’s a foodie too.

So then there’s yet another message from Goldfarb waiting for him at the hotel (I hope they don’t itemize those on the bill, but then Meehan isn’t paying, so who cares?).  Time to see the judge.  She picks him up in a limo provided by the campaign, and clearly this is the most fun she’s had in years, hard as she tries to conceal it.  The meeting in chambers goes as well as could be expected, with all kinds of judicial eye-raising (see the second of the two quotes up top, which is also about the most succinct expression of Westlake’s political philosophy as could be asked for), but the appropriate papers get stamped, and abbracadabra, Meehan is in Goldfarb’s custody, which suits him fine.

They go over to meet Jeffords at some restaurant out on Long Island, and Meehan wants to be reassured that Yehudi and Mostafa won’t be showing up at the Burnstone house while he’s working.  Jeffords says don’t worry about it, that’s been taken care of.  Suitable threats have been made.  The rich donor who was trying to get the video for his foreign friends has been informed that if there’s any further unpleasantness of that nature, he won’t be invited to the inaugural ball.  Meehan just looks at him.  “To crime,” says Jeffords, raising his glass.

And then, heading back into The City, Meehan and Goldfarb have The Talk.  Not that one, they both know where babies come from, but point is, where are they going?  Perhaps fishing a bit, Goldfarb sort of indicates that once she’s no longer his lawyer, they have no particular reason to see each other anymore.  I mean, he’s a crook.  She’s not.  The Gershwins wrote a song about this.  Tomaytoes, Tomahtoes, you know the one.

But in truth, they have much in common.  Both share a certain outlook on life, a curiosity about how things work, like language for example.  She says his being in her custody is just a technicality, and he says it’s the technicalities that clothesline you.  She’s not familiar with the term, wants to know how it originated.  She figures maybe if somebody like Meehan was doing a burglary, and the householder came home early, he might run neck-first into a clothesline trying to get away.  She’s fascinated.  “I love phrases from before technology,” she said, “that we still use.”

This is where he finally figures out she’s his soulmate, tells her he does not want to say goodbye.  She asks why.

“I dunno,” he said.  “I got used to talking with you.  Clothesline and all that.  You know, I think when I saw you that time in your apartment with the gun in your hand, stalking those guys, I decided I liked you.  You’re kinda goofy and fun.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

As professions of love go, it’s original, give it that, though it’s a few more paragraphs before she figures out he’s hitting on her.    And now she has to figure out how she feels about that.  And they agree he’ll come over to her apartment so they can work on that.  It’s a start.

Then it’s a wash, because god damn it, there’s another message blinking on his phone when he gets up to his room.    Why did people invent this answering service thing in the first place?  The message is from Jeffords, and he’s speaking in a terrified whisper, saying call him back, immediately.  Meehan calls his cellphone, and still with the terrified whisper, but he explains.  Yehudi.  Mostafa.  They grabbed him.  The threat of dis-inviting the donor to the inaugural was less effective than he’d hoped.  There has been talk of severed fingers.  Obviously these guys never read Butcher’s Moon, or else they read it as a sort of instruction manual.

So Meehan tells Goldfarb they have to put off the thing at her apartment in order to go rescue Jeffords, which she interprets as a fear of commitment on his part, thus proving she’s as feminine as the next gal, but considerably better armed.  Learning that Meehan is unarmed (as always), she says they’ll go to her apartment first, so she can get her heat, her rod, her gat (her exact words).  She’s warming to the endeavor.  It’s subtle, but you can tell.

They find Jeffords being held, as he informed Meehan in the aforementioned terrified whisper, in a ‘Reader’s’ (read ‘fortuneteller’) parlor, over by a Sloan’s supermarket on Broadway.  They have to look a bit to find the right Sloan’s, but fortunately it’s not that popular a chain.  I never liked their selection much, honestly.  They got gobbled up by Gristedes, which I don’t like that much either.  But never mind that now.

There follows a brief contretemps, in which the purportedly psychic proprietress expresses skepticism that Goldfarb would shoot anyone with that gun she’s carrying “She’s a lawyer, lady,” Meehan told her, “she’s capable of anything.”  In the end, only a very ugly painting gets perforated, and they escape in the limo with a very grateful Jeffords, who vows that Arthur’s access to the President is history, and he’s also going to see that a History of Steam museum in a certain congressional district is going to be defunded.  Don’t for one minute think this is not how American politics really works.

Meehan is fed up with these government people and their leaks.  Does anybody there know how to play this game?  Jeffords says everybody in Washington is terrified this whole situation is going to blow up, creating chaos across the board, worse than Watergate, Iran-Contra, that thing with the little blue dress that got jizzed on. Meehan says, “You people kind of specialize in farce down there in DC, don’t you?”  “Not on purpose,” an abashed Jeffords responds.  Meehan expresses a lack of understanding as to how all these people were not in the MCC with him.

Goldfarb and Meehan have yet another nice meal (paid for with our campaign donor dollars, I must remind you).  This time it’s a little French restaurant over near Times Square, kind of place my dad and I used to go when we had theater tickets.  Some of those joints have been around forever.  So has the talk they’re going to have now.  Same talk as before, only with more context.

“I’m the problem,” Meehan said.

“Truer words were never spoken.”  Looking at the wine in her glass, the glass on the red-and-white check cloth, she said “I’ve seen your dossier, you know.”

“Sure, you’re my lawyer.”

“There’s nothing much hopeful in there,” she told him.  “In fact, it’s all mostly hopeless.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a recidivist,” she said, “you’re an autodidact, no degrees, no marketable–”

“Wait a second,” he said.  “What was that one?  The second one.  I know recidivist, that’s what’s going on my tombstone, Francis Xavier Meehan, Recidivist.  But what was the other?”

She grinned at him.  “That’s funny,” she said.  “The one word every autodidact doesn’t know is autodidact.  It means self-taught.”

“Self-taught.”

“You dropped out of high school, but you’re a reader, and you’ve picked up a lot of stuff.  And given the amount of time you’ve spent behind bars,” she added drily, “you’ve had plenty of time for reading.”

“A little more than absolutely necessary,” he said.

“If your country hadn’t called you,” she said, “you’d have nothing but reading time for the rest of your life.”

“We call that a close call,” he said.

“No,” she told him, “we call it deus ex machina.”

That one he knows.  So they talk about his failed marriage, the kids he’s decided can come see him once they’re adults if they feel like it, her fiance from law school who just drifted away from her, because he was on the corporate law track, and she just wasn’t interested in any of that crap.  They’re both losers, but of vastly different types.  Both serenely independent and content before they  met.  And yet.  And yet.

Westlake loved writing love stories, but this one feels more real than all the others combined.  This is relationships he’s really had, conversations he’s really had, adult relationships, sadder but wiser relationships, the kind you have after the early ones go supernova and die.  Because until you know who you are, you can’t know who you’re supposed to be with.  And it takes us so damned long to find that out.  And the answers keeps changing as you go.

And the synopsis keeps turning out longer than I wanted it to, so let’s cut ahead a bit.  Meehan now knows what’s on the videotape he’s supposed to steal.  He insisted, and Jeffords & Benjamin reluctantly agreed.  Turns out the incumbent POTUS made a very serious error regarding Middle Eastern politics, that led to a bunch of people being killed, including some of ours.  And here you were thinking it was going to be a sex tape.  Shame on you.

As they told him, it’s not that their guy was corrupt, or malicious, but in trying to solve a problem, he exceeded his constitutional authority, as Presidents sometimes do, and created even worse problems, as is too often the case.  If it came out early in his second term, it would be a PR black eye, but not enough to topple his administration.  If it comes out now, the other guy probably wins.  Better the devil you know, right?  Well yeah, that is frequently right.  We know that now.  Well, I guess there are still some hold-outs.

Meehan and Bernie pull the heist, which isn’t going on any top ten Westlake heist lists, but it was never really the point of the story.  They get the guns, they get the tape, they get the corroborating documents, and Bob gets an earful from Clendon Burnside IV, and good thing he didn’t bring a gun with him.  He wants to go back and burn that damn house down, with Burnstone inside it, but Meehan persuades him to put those bloody thoughts aside, and concentrate on profit.  Oh, and could Bob possibly hold onto something for him?  Stow it at the garage on 125th.

Jeffords actually participates at one point, filling in for Bob as driver (Burnside doesn’t know him by sight).  Would you believe he actually enjoys listening to the old bat?  Mainly he just likes the idea of driving Bob Clarence’s beautiful new Jaguar, which Bob lets him know he better not put so much as the tiniest scratch on.  But the joys of the Jag aside, he found Burnside fascinating.

“I admire the effect,” Jeffords said.  “If I could tap into the subtext of fears and prejudices and prides and misunderstood history the way he can, only with a little more self-awareness, bring it out a little smoother, a little blander, I wouldn’t be a groundling in the CC, I’d be running for President myself.”

(I somehow feel that additional commentary is unneeded here.)

So all that remains is to meet Jeffords at one last final restaurant (honest!)  A diner.  No Westlake heist is truly complete without the double-cross after it’s all over, and guess where it’s coming from this time?  Well, you don’t need to guess, it was in that review blurb from Marilyn Stasio that I posted up-top in Part 1. But she misattributed the money quote.   She thought it was Meehan who said it.  It was Jeffords.  He feels really bad about this, Meehan having saved his life and his fingers and everything.  But they’re going to have to send him back to prison, for like, ever.

See, here’s the problem.  Meehan knows too much.  They can’t have him running around free with all that dangerous intel, and even if they could trust him, there’s the press sniffing around, wondering why this 42 year old thief facing a life sentence for mail theft got remanded to his lawyer’s custody in Juvie court.  Meehan already had to dodge some reporters at the hotel, who have the wrong idea entirely about what’s going on, but they’ll keep digging.  The political ops just can’t take the risk.  And it’s just who they are.

Meehan saw.  That was the worst of it, sometimes, being able to see the other guy’s point of view.  “I didn’t think you’d do this to me, Jeffords.”

Jeffords sighed.  “Oh, they never do,” he said.  “It gets them all, though, sooner or later.  They’ve been warned, they know better, they know all the bitter histories, but they just can’t help themselves.  They want to believe.  Everybody, somewhere down the line, trusts a politician.”

That’s the end of Chapter 46.  Chapter 47 begins with Meehan saying “Not quite everybody.”  Remember how Meehan left the evidence with Bob Clarence?  He’s got a package with him, sure.  It’s got a videotape in it.  Know what video it is?

I guess the PG stands for Politicians so Gullible?  See, they are just regular people, after all.

Jeffords is furious, and somehow manages to express a sense of betrayal, but Meehan has him, and he knows it.  It wasn’t that he wanted to send Meehan back inside, but as he puts it, the idea of anything or anybody being out of their control just bothers them.  Nature of the beast.  And now the beast is going to give Francis Xavier Meehan a hundred bucks walking around money, and pay the check.

There’s one more little dance with Yehudi and Mostafa, that vaguely echoes a scene from Flashfire (yet another duo of hitmen in a Westlake book, only they never get to hit anybody in this one).   He threatens to sic Goldfarb on them, and by this time they’re so confused and demoralized, they don’t even put up much of a fight.  Forget it, Mostafa, it’s Yankeetown.  Let’s go home.

He calls Goldfarb.  It’s time for that talk, some of which might be of the pillow variety (he could use the rest by this time).  She says she can’t ask him to reform, she’s not trying to change him.  He says he’s ready to change himself.   He’s got enough money now to tide him over a while (“No details!” she exclaims one last time.)  She’s got social service connections, she could maybe help him land a job counseling ex-cons, tell them how they can use the ten thousand rules in the straight world.

The ten thousand what?  That’s right, he’d almost mentioned them to her before, and just barely caught himself, because that’s not something he talks about to anyone–it’s one of the ten thousand rules, apparently, that you don’t talk about the ten thousand rules.  But now he can talk about them to her.  She’ll be all ears, I bet.  End of book.

I wouldn’t put this one in my Westlake top ten, or even my top twenty, but it holds a special place in my heart, because it’s the very last time he successfully reinvented himself as a writer.  Sure, it’s full of ideas he’d employed before, sometimes more successfully, sometimes much less.  But just as he’d looked back at his twenties from his thirties and forties, in his work from the 60’s and 70’s, he’s looking back at his forties from his very late sixties in the late 90’s here.  If that makes any sense.

It’s a solid well-balanced complete novel, that hits every bullseye it aims at, personal and political, and that’s really the point here–that you have to make both things work.  Not just one or the other.  Because either one can fuck the other one up but good.

Worldly wise though he be, Meehan has been playing Candide here.  I suppose Jeffords was Dr. Pangloss, though you could make a case for Burnstone (still forlornly waiting, one imagines, for his stage, his podium, his audience of worshipful WASPs).  What was the point of Voltaire’s story?  It is best to cultivate one’s garden.  And now Meehan gets to cultivate his Goldfarb, and she him–even better.

But that’s never enough, and Westlake couldn’t have believed it was.  So what’s the real point, since if it was identical to Voltaire’s (who never really believed it anyway, just look at his life), there’d be no point in making it.  What’s he really trying to say, and why did he begin this book by telling we, his loyal readers, that he knew one of the three young men who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964, for the crime of giving a shit about what happens to other people?

I do not, can not, will not believe that Westlake was saying Mickey Schwerner threw his life away for nothing.  Meehan quotes Sherlock Holmes at one point, says that maybe one of the ten thousand rules is “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  It’s IMPOSSIBLE that Donald Westlake thought Mickey Schwerner was a fool.

But satire is never meant to be taken literally, you see.  Satire is a gun that fires in every direction at once.  Satire is how we learn to take things more seriously by way of laughing at them.  I think on one level, he was just levitating Mickey out of his premature grave, giving him a different name, letting him live a more carefree less conscientious existence, have a nice score, meet a nice girl (perhaps not entirely unlike the girl he made a widow of in pursuit of the greater good, though she was every bit as gung ho for that as he). And even so, in the end, he’s going to do what Mickey did, work with people, try to share what he knows with them, because that’s what a mensch does.  That’s what a mensch is.  Forest green.

I read up on him as much as I could, and in the midst of all the pious eulogies about his honorable death, I read something that sounded 100% real.  Sue Brown, a mere girl of seventeen when she met him, had this to say.

More than any white person I have ever known he could put a colored person at ease.  To a group of young Negroes he didn’t seem like a preacher, a do-gooder, or a social worker, or somebody who was out slumming, or a reporter who had come to learn about the Negroes.  He was the only white man I have ever known that you could associate with and forget he was white.  He didn’t talk down or up to you, he just talked to you.  He made you feel he was interested in you, not because you were a Negro, but because you were folks too.  He never pretended he knew what was best for you.

And that’s the kind of political activism a Donald E. Westlake could believe in, applaud, and even maybe think was worth dying for, but worth living for as well, surely.  And please note she said Schwerner was the only white person like that she’d ever known.  Not many people like that anywhere, any color.  How many more can we afford to lose?

Call it a mirror universe, if you will.  Instead of three martyrs, two Jewish, one black, we have three heisters, and Schwerner is Irish this time, but hey, the guy called himself Mickey, right?  And I’ve often felt the difference between Jewish and Irish is purely academic.   The differences between individualists of any ethnicity are pretty academic.  Because an individualist is him or herself first, and everything else second.  And it’s the individualist who represents hope for the future.  Not every man for himself.  But every man knowing himself.  Or woman.  Same thing, down inside.

The point of the book isn’t that all politicians are crooks (in fact, there’s no evidence any of the politicians represented here are particularly corrupt, certainly not on the level of Idi Amin, who Westlake had written about in Kahawa–what comes after Democracy fails is exponentially worse than anything that comes before).  It’s not that you should behave as if they’re all equally bad, because that’s a cop out.  Meehan is seen in full philosophic mode at the end, and this is what he thinks–

He had time to sit for a while, on the platform, looking out from the station at the wide slow river and all of America beyond it, and to think that, if he cared about it, he could probably decide the upcoming Presidential election right now, all by himself.  But that would mean looking at these people, those candidates, getting involved, studying their histories and their programs, making an informed decision; so screw it.  Let the Americans work it out for themselves.  How bad a choice could they make?

You don’t want to know, Francis.  You really really don’t.  But that’s a nice modest little proposal you made there.  We could just take responsibility, for our choices, for our lives, for ourselves.  That’s what Democracy is supposed to be, but we cop out.  We say “I’m for this guy, I trust him, he’ll make America great again, he’ll take our country back, he’ll make those bastards pay for what they’ve done to us, he’ll bring about the Revolution!”  (The last one was for the Bernie-istas, and can I ask–where are his tax returns?  Mock not, lest ye be mocked.)

And over on the other side, they’re saying the same things about us, and trusting somebody else.  Maybe somebody worse, but it’s all relative, right?  No, dammit, it’s not about trusting politicians (or deluding ourselves that somebody running for high office isn’t one, by definition, a denial that sounds more like satire than any satire I’ve ever read).  It’s about trusting our ability to govern ourselves, which means hiring good solid professionals to run the place, and keeping a sharp eye on them to make sure they’re not cooking the books.  Not just showing up to vote for the one with the best catchphrases every four years or so.

And all we’re doing to ourselves with these periodic bursts of enthusiasm, for politics but never for policy, is sabotaging the few genuine leaders we do elect, by handing the whole job over to them, expecting them to do it all themselves, and then we’ve got somebody to blame when things don’t work out as planned, as they never ever do.  Who was it who said “We are the ones we have been waiting for”?  Some politician, quoting a poet.  Only politician I’d have ever taken a bullet for.  But just as happy I didn’t have to.  And I honestly don’t think he would have asked me to.

In politics, naivete and cynicism go hand in hand, each supporting the other, and if that’s ever going to change, we need to know ourselves.  Who we are, what we want, where we’re going.  When will we ever do this?  Westlake didn’t know, and neither do I.  I do know I’m way over 7,000 words, so the review’s over.

And next up in our queue is a Parker novel, one that oddly echoes this book, but to paraphrase Mark Twain, those who try to find political satire in it will be shot.  However, before I get to that, I need to talk about the very last Donald Westlake novel ever published.  Not to review it.  That will come later.  Call this a first reaction.  Now nail that lid down tight, because I have done.