Addendum: The Mystery of Joseph Albert

“I’ll carry the message,” Meany said.

“Yes, you will,” Parker agreed.  “On the floor.”

“I’ll carry it now!  I’ll make a phone call!”

“Who to?

Meany licked his lips.  His elbows were twitching back and forth from the strain of holding his hands together on top of his head.  “One of the owners,” he said. “A guy that can make the offer.”

“What’s his name?”

Meany didn’t like doing this, but he knew he had no choice.  “Joseph Albert.”

Parker looked at Arthur.  “Do you know that name?”

From Firebreak, by Richard Stark.

“You look more like your mother than your father,” he said.

Then I got it.  “You’re a lying son of a bitch,” I said.

“You look a lot more like her. I know.  I see your father in the mirror every morning.”

I laughed at him.  “You’re crazy, or you think we are.  Or are you just wisecracking again?”

“It’s true,” he said.

Bill said, “What the hell’s going on?”

From 361, by Donald E. Westlake.

I’ve written my last Stark review.  (Unless there’s some unpublished manuscript out there, awaiting rediscovery.  I think we’d know by now.)  Not my last Stark analysis by a long shot.  There will always be more to say about an author that interesting, even if he was just one voice within the convoluted cranium of Donald Edwin Westlake.

But I did think, after typing out three part reviews of  Firebreak and Dirty Money, that I had at least covered the bases for both those books, plumbed their essential mysteries  Again, I’m forced to say–I was wrong.  I missed the most tantalizing mystery of all.

Throughout the series, starting with The Hunter, Parker had come up against arrogant mob bosses.  Taking money from them, waging wars of attrition upon them, forming alliances of convenience with them, and, more than once, murdering them when they became sufficiently irksome.

Arthur Bronson.  Walter Karns.  Adolf Lozini.  Louis Buenadella.  The excellent character guide for these books maintained at the University of Chicago Press website, glosses over the details a bit when it refers to them all as members of ‘The Outfit.’  Lozini and Buenadella are midwestern mafiosi, aware of The Outfit (still headed by Karns at the time of Butcher’s Moon), loosely affiliated with it perhaps, but not under its sway. Only Bronson, Karns and their various subordinates referred to in the first sixteen novels would count as members of that national syndicate, peddling vice to the masses.

To Parker, I should add, the differences between various criminal organizations are meaningless, semantic–their names are just words these people play with to pretend they’re something more than thieves, like him.  He recognizes them as part of his world, on the same general side of the law as him, and sometimes he has to deal with them. Thorough-going independent that he is, he can never identify with any such group.  His ethos and theirs are diametrically opposed.  In this, Parker represents his creator’s own deep feelings about authority, and more specifically, corporations, legal and otherwise.

The final such enterprise Parker encountered, first in Firebreak, then again in Dirty Money, was Cosmopolitan Beverages, an ‘import/export’ business (another fancy name, this time for smuggling), headquartered in Bayonne NJ, run day to day by Frank Meany, described as a semi-reformed thug wearing expensive suits.

But The Big Boss (one of five, we’re told), is named Joseph Albert.  We never see him,  Parker only talks to him on speakerphone.  We’re told his voice is heavy, guarded.  He sounds educated–doesn’t talk like a thug, reformed or otherwise (we’ll assume his suits are even nicer than Meany’s).  A CEO of crime.  If that’s not too redundant a term.

By the end of Dirty Money, by default the end of his story, Parker has formed yet another alliance of convenience, this time with Cosmopolitan.  He’ll sell them the roughly two million dollars from the bank in Massachusetts,  for 200k in untraceable cash–they can launder the bills overseas.  Gives him money to live on, gives them a little more liquidity.

He attaches one more condition to the deal–they put him on their employment rolls, vouch for him with the straight world, so he can create a new identity for himself, have a driver’s license and passport that will hold up to all but the most intense scrutiny.  A strictly no-show job (mob guys know all about those).  Meany and Albert will be only his nominal bosses–but still–it’s a compromise.  The biggest he’s ever made.

The Information Age is becoming a problem. Forcing him to make difficult choices.  But he never flinches from those.  Without good ID, he’s not going to stay free much longer.  But it suddenly occurs to me–what he’s doing here is not entirely unlike what Mal Resnick did–for very different motives–when he gave all the money he and Parker had stolen together to The Outfit, to regain his position there.

Joseph Albert is briefly referenced in Dirty Money–Meany clears the exchange with him, and reports to Parker that Mr. Albert said that if Meany wanted to cut a deal with a son of a bitch like that, it’s up to him.  In Firebreak, remember, Parker had more than hinted that if Albert didn’t call off the hit on him they’d ordered as a favor to Paul Brock, he’d be putting one out on Albert, after he killed Meany.  And carrying out the contract in person, as usual.  Difficult to say how personally Albert took that threat.  On the phone, he sounded very cold and businesslike.  More of a Karns than a Bronson.

So what would have happened if there had been more novels?  Would this arrangement have held?  There are reasons to doubt it.  Parker has effectively shared his score with them.  Suppose they decide they want a share of subsequent heists?  Suppose they decide he really is their employee?  Suppose they have little errands for him to run?  How much can he say no to, before they tell him play ball or his cover’s blown?  He and Claire can walk away from the house in New Jersey, but it would be harder for him to walk away from his new name (whatever it is).

You have to figure there would be some kind of showdown.  Perhaps not as sanguinary as the previous wars.  But when Parker has a problem with middle management, he always wants to go straight to the top.  And that’s not Meany.  That’s Albert.  Interesting name, that.  Joseph Albert. Is that the whole moniker, or just first and middle?  You know, like Sinatra was sometimes called Francis Albert.

I don’t know how I missed this for so long.  Granted, when I started reading these books, I  had almost no background info on their author.  But it’s been a few years since I learned the name of Westlake’s father.  Albert Joseph Westlake. That’s right.

And I also learned that after Albert Joseph’s death, Westlake discovered his father knew people in organized crime, back during the Prohibition era. He may, in fact, have done accounting work for bootleggers.  You know.  People who smuggle alcoholic beverages, among other things.  Import/Export.  A very cosmopolitan trade, I’ve heard.

So shall we chalk this up to coincidence, or a private joke?  I don’t think so.  He’s telling us something.  He knows most of his readers won’t twig to it, but he thinks some of us will (I doubt I’m the first).  The Parker novels aren’t whodunnit mysteries (The Jugger being a partial exception), but mysteries they are, all the same.  Mystery writers give you clues.  It’s up to you to put the pieces together.  To look underneath the surface of things.  These books were never just about stealing and killing.

But what is this about?  Was Parker headed for an “I am your father” moment?  Pretty sure he turned to the dark side a long time ago.  The supreme mystery of the series–the one we never got close to solving–was where did someone as strange as Parker come from in the first place?

We know he served in the army during WWII in his early teens, going by his age when we meet him (and this is something that happened a lot more than people think).  We know he got dishonorably discharged after getting involved in the black market, and that it didn’t bother him one bit.

We know he lived in cities when he was younger, never felt at home there.  We know he got involved with armed robbery somehow, after the war.  We know he got married, that he was in love with his wife, but that he lost all interest in sex a few months after he pulled a job, only to have his libido ramp back up again after he pulled another.  That’s it.  He is never seen to think about anybody he knew before all that.  He doesn’t have any tattoos (unless you count bullet wounds), but if he did, you can bet none of them would say “Mother.”

His alternate universe mirror twin, John Dortmunder, was found abandoned at the door of a convent, when only a few minutes old.  Raised by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery.  So did something comparable (but utterly devoid of comic overtones) happen to Parker?  Only without the nuns, or a long stretch in prison?  Is that why he had to grow up so fast? Or was he ever really a kid at all?  Who–or what–could have given birth to such an unaccountable creature?  Who could have fathered him? Being a foundling doesn’t explain him in the least. Maybe nothing could.

The Hunter was written more or less in tandem with 361, the best of Westlake’s early crime novels, before he became known more for comic capers under his own name.  (Both books feature the George Washington Bridge in their opening chapters.)  It’s a taut little noir masterpiece, about a young man named Ray Kelly, just out of the army, who finds out the man he sees as his father wasn’t always an honest lawyer–he used to work for a mob boss.  The mob boss, named Kapp, is Ray’s biological father.  Who tries to make the protagonist accept him as his true father.  Doesn’t go well.

Ray’s mother killed herself, when he was very young.  The mobster tells him she was–different.  She married Ray’s foster father first, had a son with him.  Motherhood brought something out of her, something Kapp couldn’t quite describe, something that attracted him, so he took her, and she went, willingly.  Ray looks like her, he’s told–and he’s like her in less obvious ways.  He has his father’s brains, drive, genius for criminal intrigue, and violence comes naturally to him–but he’s not a joiner.  Not an organization man.  Independent to the core.

And he wants the truth, at all costs.  He wants to know about himself, even if it means destroying every last vestige of his old identity.  He’s telling us all this in first person narrator form.  And we still feel like he’s not really sharing with us.  Always holding back.  A stranger on this earth, as much as anyone Camus (or Dinah Washington) ever imagined.

It’s not hard to divine that 361 was part of how Westlake dealt with mixed feelings about his family.  The man who raised Ray Kelly clearly loved him, was loved in return.  As Westlake was loved by the man who got him out of trouble, when he was caught stealing equipment from a college laboratory for pocket change.  Then apologized to his son for not being able to give him everything he needed in life. But is that all there was to the relationship?  Gratitude and guilt?

Albert Joseph Westlake worked very hard, kept his own counsel.  On the road for business, he felt a heart attack coming on, checked into a hotel, drank cheap liquor until it had passed.  When he lost his job, he went out day after day, as if he was still employed, keeping it from his wife and children for months.  Because that’s what he thought a man does.  Whatever he may or may not have done for bootleggers–that wasn’t something he ever shared with his son, and his wife didn’t know much about it either–just that a well-known gangster once approached him, addressed him as Al.

Westlake had his doubts about this way of living, but he could respect it.  What he couldn’t do was accept the life his father had chosen–whether it was working for a company or a mob.  He was going to work for himself, hew to a different path.  His father never lived to see him succeed on that path.  Is it likely the father had nothing to say about the pragmatic drawbacks of the career choice his son had made?

With rare exceptions (Up Your Banners comes to mind) Westlake never wrote too much about parent/child relationships.  He came at them obliquely, for the most part.  So yes, I think this is another case of that sideways glance at his own childhood–feeling his father never was honest and open with him.  Feeling abandoned at times by a mother who worked constantly herself.  Feeling like a cuckoo in the nest. Different. Odd.

But at the end of the day–and Dirty Money was written at the very end–hadn’t Westlake ultimately spent his life working for corporations?  Literary agencies, publishers, film studios.  Yes, freelance work.  What’s the difference?  It still amounts to giving the bosses what they want in exchange for the money to support yourself and your loved ones.  He was more creative than his father, sure.  More independent.  Lots richer. But in his mind, Albert Joseph Westlake still loomed over him.  As fathers tend to do, all the more in death.

What was going to happen? Is Joseph Albert literally Parker’s long lost sire, or just a sly subtextual metaphor for Donald Edwin’s conflicted emotions regarding Albert Joseph?  Could be both.  Not neither.

Would Parker have been forced to go to war with Albert, to kill him, or be killed by him?  Would he declare independence once more, or would he be drawn further in for a time, as Ray Kelly was?  Would we at least find out who his mother was?

Remember Quittner, from Butcher’s Moon?  Somebody like Parker, it’s implied–who had joined a criminal syndicate, surrendered his independence.  And over time, this compromise had eaten away at his sense of self.  Made him a shadow of the wolf he was born to be.  Unable to cope with the wilder freer version of himself he was confronted by in Tyler.  If it could happen to him, it could happen to Parker too.  But would Stark allow that?  Could he prevent it?  The romanticism of the earlier books was, as I’ve already mentioned, starting to wear thin in the latter ones.

I think no matter how many more Parker novels Westlake had written, we’d never have gotten all the answers.  But as matters worked out, we got none.  Just a question that was never asked out loud.  Who is Joseph Albert?  And why, when Meany comes to him with Parker’s offer, does he say (according to Meany), “If you want to deal with a son of a bitch like him, it’s okay with me”?

Technically any male wolf–well, I’m reading too much into it.  I do that sometimes.  But the mystery remains.  Everyone in this world faces the same mystery.   Who was my father?  Who was my mother?  That relationship can span most of our lives.  We can love them, hate them, condemn them, forgive them, ignore them.  Do we ever know them?  And if not, do we ever really know ourselves?

Search your feelings.  You know it to be true.

Review: Dirty Money, Part 3

Parker took the Bobcat from his pocket and put it on the table, then left it there with his hands resting on the tabletop to both sides, not too close.  “That’s who I am,” he said.  “You Oscar’s brother?”

The guy stared at the gun, not afraid of it, but as though waiting to see it move.  “No,” he said, not looking up.  “I got no brothers named Oscar.”

“Well, how important is Oscar to you, then?  Important enough to die for?”

Now the guy did meet Parker’s eyes, and his own were scornful.  “The only thing you’re gonna shoot off in here is your mouth,” he said.  “You don’t want a lotta noise to wake the dog.”

Parker picked up the Bobcat and pushed its barrel into the guy’s sternum, just below the rib cage.  “In my experience,” he said, “with a little gun like this, a body like yours makes a pretty good silencer.”

The money inside the boxes was all banded into stacks of fifty bills, always of the same denomination.  The bands, two-inch-wide strips of pale yellow paper, were marked DEER HILL BANK, DEER HILL, MA.  The stacks made a tight fit inside the boxes.

It turned out to be easiest to dump a box over, empty the money onto the floor of the van, and then stuff it all into the Hefty bags.  The emptied box, with its cover restored, would be stacked with the others in the bed of the pickup.

As they worked, McWhitney said, “It’s a pity about this stuff.  Look how beautiful it is.”

“It’ll tempt you,” Parker said.  “But it’s got a disease.”

April 27th, 2008.  Not quite three years shy of a half century from when Donald Westlake first showed Lawrence Block a draft of The Hunter, Richard Stark got his last New York Times book review, courtesy of Marilyn Stasio.

The nice thing about the rather nasty stories Richard Stark (a k a Donald E. Westlake) writes about a career criminal named Parker is that none of the significant characters is ever innocent. Which is why it’s so easy to laugh when their intricate schemes begin to unravel, as happened in “Nobody Runs Forever” after Parker’s gang stashed the loot from a bank job in the choir loft of an abandoned country church — and couldn’t get it out. Although he’s still being pursued by the vigilant detective Gwen Reversa and the odd reporter, Parker gives criminality another shot in DIRTY MONEY (Grand Central, $23.99), under pressure from Sandra Loscalzo, an aggressive bounty hunter who’s even less trustworthy than the killers and con men she stalks for a living. Everyone in this merry misadventure ends up at Bosky Rounds, a quaint bed-and-breakfast that looks like the cover art for Yankee magazine — something to bear in mind on leaf-peeping excursions to picturesque New England villages.

Sometimes I’ve wondered if Stasio was reading the same books as me, but no two people have ever read the same book, any more than one person reads the same book twice.  (I come from the Heraclitus school of book reviewing).

Me, I don’t think Stark, at any time, is encouraging us to laugh at Parker–with him, maybe.  To sport a rueful grin at how the best laid plans of wolves and men gang aft agley, absolutely.  That goes with the territory. That’s what the heist subgenre is all about, going back to The Asphalt Jungle, or if you please, Jason and the Argonauts.

But if that grin doesn’t come with a glimmer of recognition as to how this insight applies just as much to us and our ostensibly more honest endeavors, you sure haven’t learned much from these books.  I’m all for entertainment, but entertainment that doesn’t on some level enlighten probably isn’t worth the time it took to peruse.  I mean, unless you’re planning to live forever.

Stasio couldn’t know that this was the last we’d hear from Richard Stark, that Donald E. Westlake would be dead in a little over eight months.  He sure wasn’t making any plans to live forever.  But he was making plans.   Right to the end.

I agree with her that nobody in these novels is ever innocent–and how many in real life ever are?  I’m not.  Why, may I ask, are so many innocent people enjoying stories about murder, mayhem, vengeance, betrayal and pillage?  And I don’t just mean on cable news.  Or in the bible.

I don’t rule out that there’s truly innocent people in the world, or at least truly good people, but doesn’t seem to me they’d constitute much of an audience.  Whether they were shelling out thirty-five cents for The Hunter in ’62, or $23.99 for Dirty Money in ’08, the publisher would go bankrupt if the readership was composed of saints.

No, I think the enduring popularity of these books attests to the fact that we know (and the saints most of all)  that we’re none of us all that innocent, and we’re still waiting nervously for some kind of law to catch up with us, and it will, never fear.  (My money’s on thermodynamics.)

But in the meantime, we’ve still got plans.  Most of which don’t work out half so well as Parker’s.  Truth is, Ms. Stasio, we’re not laughing at him at all.  We’re envying him.  His coolness under pressure, his lack of envy, fear, prejudice, treachery.  His matter-of-fact reaction to every setback, coupled with a determination to find the problem and fix it.  His patience.  His pragmatism.  His perseverance.  In short, his professionalism.

It seems perverse to say out loud, but these books have been at least as much about virtue as vice.  Whatever you do in life, do it well, as if how you perform your chosen task matters no less than your compensation for performing it, if indeed you get any.  Most of us don’t have such exciting jobs as Parker, to be sure.  But hey, we get retirement plans and health insurance.  Some of us.  For now.

If we’re laughing at anyone in these books, it’s those of inferior professionalism, or none at all.  Comparing their garrulous gamesmanship to the taciturn protagonist who is playing at nothing, because life isn’t a game, and neither is death.  That’s been the point of Parker, all along.  Made better in some books than others, and this last book is far from the best, but that’s because the professional behind them all is starting to lose his grip on the wheel.  Yet he refuses to call it a day.  He’ll know it’s time to lay down tools when the whistle blows.  Not before.

This is a flawed faltering book at points, but compelling all the same, like the twenty-three before it.  In Part Four, feeling the law closing in on him, that part of Westlake that is Richard Stark produces what I’d call, on reflection, a tightly-focused novella within a novel–to close out the day’s work.  Laying the groundwork for more books, that we’ll never read, because the whistle blew.  In Mexico.  And wouldn’t you know I’d get to this one during Dia de los Muertas.  Hay más tiempo que vida.  Adelante.

Part Four opens with Parker checking to see if anybody picks up at Julius Norte’s number in Florida–the guy who did such a good job making him into Daniel Parmitt, in Flashfire.  He’s dead, of course, but maybe somebody else is doing the high-end ID work there now?  Nope.  That office is closed.

He reaches Ed Mackey, through channels of course–Mackey doesn’t have a direct phone number.  (Remind us again why Parker does?)  Mackey gets back to him at the good old gas station phone booth near Colliver Pond, and hey, does this gas station have free road maps and a uniformed attendant who chirps “Fillerup?” and then he cleans your windshield?  Because if they’ve got an actual working phone booth, really should make the whole retro experience complete.

Mackey isn’t working for the time being–says Brenda wants him to stay home (what happened in Breakout might be leaning both of them in the direction of semi-retirement, but it’s nothing definite).   Parker says he just wants to know if Mackey knows anybody else as good as Norte.  Mackey says he’ll ask around, and a day later, he’s got the name of a guy outside Baltimore, who seems well-regarded in their circle.  Kazimierz Robbins.  Not a name you hear every day.

He fronts as an artist.  You call him, tell him you need a portrait painted.  You mention a name of somebody he knows, and it’s understood–you want a special portrait.  A new identity.  And for that, you really do need an artist.  Though there has probably never been anyone less sympathetic to the artistic temperament than Parker.

“You understand, my studio is not in my home.”

“Okay.”

“I use the daylight hours to do my work.  Artificial light is no good for realistic painting.”

“Okay.”

“These clumpers and streakers, they don’t care what the color is.  But I care.”

“That’s good.”

“So my consultations are at night, not to interfere with my work.  I return to my studio to discuss the client’s needs.  Could you come here tonight?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“That is also good.  Would nine o’clock be all right for you?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.  And when you come here, sir, what is your name?”

“Willis.”

“Willis.” There was a hint of “v” in the name.  “We will see you then, Mr. Willis,” he said, and gave the address.

After that, he talks to Meany, at Cosmopolitan Beverages, about the deal that will make it possible for Parker to pay for his new identity and still have something left to live on.  The big boss, Joseph Albert, has okayed it.  They need to see a sample of the cash–say ten thousand, just to make sure this is the bank money.  Parker says fine, but they’ll pay one thousand to see the ten thousand, because that’s the deal.

He calls McWhitney, tells him to make the exchange, gives him the contact info, hangs up.  He’s made all these calls from that same gas station phone booth.  You’d think somebody there would notice what a regular customer he is.  At some point, he needs to upgrade more than just his ID.  Payphones can be tapped, particularly if you keep using the same one. (Also, how come he never hears a voice telling him he has to cough up more quarters?  Even the phone company is afraid to ask him for money.)

Claire has to drive him to see Robbins.  He lives in a small town called Vista, which does not exist, near Gunpowder Falls State Park, which does.  His studio is in a space that used to be a hardware store. Robbins is there, older, arthritic, tall, thin, slightly bent–Stark tells us he looks like a praying mantis.  Claire opts to stay in the car, but Robbins notices her, says it’s well she did not enter, since beautiful women are always a distraction to him.  He tells Parker to call him Robbins, since he dislikes hearing Americans mangle his first and true name.

As they walked down the long room, on an old floor of wide pine planks, Parker said, “Why didn’t you change the first name?”

“Ego,” Robbins said, and motioned for Parker to sit.  “Many are Robbins, or my original name, Rudzik, but from earliest childhood Kazimierz has been me.”  Also sitting, he leaned forward onto his knees, peered at Parker, and said, “Tell me what you can.”

“I no longer have an identity,” Parker said, “that’s safe from the police.”

“Fingerprints?”

“If we’re at the point of fingerprints,” Parker said, “it’s already too late.  I need papers to keep me from getting that far.”

“And how secure must these be?” He gave a little finger wave and said, “What I mean is, you want more than a simple forged driver’s license.”

“I want to survive a police computer,” Parker said.  “I don’t have a passport; I want one.”

“A legitimate passport.”

“Everything legitimate.”

Robbins leaned back.  “Nothing is impossible,” he said.  “But everything is expensive.”

“I know that.”

Robbins says it will cost two hundred thousand dollars.  Cash.  Parker figured that would be about it.  Half in advance, of course.  And even the former Mr. Rudzik (a Polish name) is surprised to learn Parker brought the cash with him.  “You are serious!” he exclaims.  Well, yeah.

So Robbins is Polish, he grew up under communism, learned his trade well, still has contacts over there.  Infant mortality under communism was higher than Marx and Lenin would have liked to believe.  So he can find some short-lived boy, born around the same time as Parker, give Parker the identity the child never had the chance to use himself.  A cover story must be concocted to explain why Parker has no eastern European accent (ever wondered what accent he does have?)

He’ll apply for a Social Security card–protective coloration–one is reminded how Joe Sheer laughed for days when he got his card in the mail, for a name he’d made up. He laughed hard, but not long.

To get all this done, to make the new identity stick, he’ll need to pose as a Canadian representative of an American company.  Which means he’ll need to work with Cosmopolitan Beverages again.  Getting to be a habit.  He gives Robbins Meany’s phone number (Robbins would have preferred his email).  Parker and Claire have worked out a new first name for him, and Robbins will attend to the family name.

He goes out and gets the duffel–presumably the same one Tom Lindahl picked up at a mall in upstate New York.  Full of cash from a racetrack.  Parker’s entire share of that job.  He’s going all in on this.  He passes portraits of celebrities Robbins has painted, from photographs we assume, to maintain the front.  They all look guarded, watchful.

That’s Saturday.  Monday, he’s driving to Bayonne, home of Cosmopolitan Beverages, and Stark has a positive genius for capturing the inimitable ambience of that highly scenic locale, but we’ve covered that already in Firebreak.  He’s driving himself this time, since it’s a short hop.  He passes somebody with a bumper sticker saying DRIVE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT, which to Parker means drive so the law won’t notice you.

He doesn’t have an appointment, but he’s never stood on ceremony when it comes to mobsters of any stripe.  The guy at the reception desk tries to give him the brush off, and Parker doesn’t hit him, just tosses the kid’s copy of Maxim on the floor, so it’s not as if he hasn’t acquired a modicum of social veneer.

He and Meany are still sparring whenever they meet.  Meany’s going to enjoy this bout in particular.

Meany said, “What can I do for you today?”

“You liked the sample.”

“It’s very nice money,” Meany said.  “Too bad it’s radioactive.”

“Do you still want to buy the rest of it?”

“If we can work out delivery,” Meany said.  “I got no more reason to trust you than you got to trust me.”

“You could give us reason to trust each other,” Parker said.

Meany gave him a sharp look.  “Is this something new?”

“Yes. How that money came to me, things went wrong.”

Meany’s smile was thin, but honestly amused. “I got that idea,” he said.

“At the end of it,” Parker told him, “my ID was just as radioactive as that money.”

“That’s too bad,” Meany said, not sounding sympathetic.  “So you’re a guy now can’t face a routine traffic stop, is that it?”

“I can’t do anything,” Parker told him.  “I’ve got to build a whole new deck.”

“I don’t get why you’re telling me all this.”

“For years now,” Parker told him, “I’ve been working for your office in Canada.”

Meany sat back, ready to enjoy the show. “Oh yeah?  That was you?”

“A guy named Robbins is gonna call you, ask for some employment records.  I know you do this kind of thing, you’ve got zips, you’ve got different kinds of people your payroll office doesn’t know a thing about.”

“People come into the country, people go back out of the country,” Meany said, and shrugged.  “It’s a service we perform.  They gotta have a good-looking story.”

“So do I.”

Meany wants to know why he’d agree to this.  Parker says it’s a finder’s fee, for bringing him this nice little bump in corporate earnings for the fiscal year.  If Meany won’t help him out, he can go to somebody else in Bayonne with all that nice money.  Cosmopolitan doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of thing.

And why should this arrangement cultivate trust between them, Meany wants to know.

“You’re gonna know my new straight name,” Parker pointed out. “And how I got it.  So then we’ve both been  useful to each other, so we have a little more trust for each other.  And I know, if sometime you decide you don’t like me, you could wreck me.”

“I don’t like you.”

“We’ll try to live with that,” Parker said.

It’s a deal, if not quite an amicable one.  As to the exchange, two million in crisp new bank notes for two hundred thousand in more experienced money Parker & Co. can actually spend, Parker says they’ll use the ferry between Orient Point and New London.  Meany’s guy drives onto it with the 200k, somebody else drives if off the ferry, he rides back and forth until the car comes back with the two mil.  Parker can’t get his new ID if Meany doesn’t get the bank money.

(This creates a new level of vulnerability, as Parker noted.  He’s compromising his independent status, and with the very type of organization he’s fought two bloody wars with in past. But, you could argue, Meany already sent a hit man to the house at Colliver Pond, a few years back. He’s already got a handle on Parker, if he wants to  use it.

If Parker can abandon the house, as he might yet have to do, he can abandon a burned identity, and he has, many times before.  Meany knows from personal experience that if you shoot at Parker, you only get to miss once.  He was lucky to survive the last time. And he might have use for Parker in future.  But still–it’s a compromise Parker has never had to make before.  To even pretend to be somebody’s employee.  It’s hard to see how this ends well, but we’ll never see how it ends.)

Parker goes back to Claire, and gets some more money from one of the empty summer houses he uses as safe deposit boxes.  We’re told more than half the money from the racetrack heist is spent–come again?  Parker and Lindahl got a bit under 200k from Gro-More.  Lindahl packed the duffels, while Parker dealt with complications.  Tom was in a hurry, no time to count it out, but it’s hard to figure he would have given Parker much more than half the score, and Parker just gave Robbins 100k. Well, I mentioned the creative accounting already.  I make far worse errors when I’m tired. Some people don’t need to be tired to make fatal errors.

Claire tells Parker McWhitney left a message on their machine–reading between the lines, he’s calling for help.  Oscar Sidd is back, and McWhitney has the money.  If he doesn’t get there soon, the entire deal is shot.  He can feel this pushing the button in his head, the one that makes him kill, but he holds it in check.  He can’t afford a war right now.  But there’s going to be a skirmish.

He just wants a ride to the city, but Claire insists on driving him to Long Island–have to get to the bar before it closes.  He tells her to drop him off a block away.  She tells him she’ll have dinner in Manhattan, maybe catch a late movie, and he can call her cell if he needs anything.  It’s becoming increasingly clear Parker is the only person he knows who doesn’t have a cellphone yet.

He’s come heeled, but with his usual minimalist flair.  The final gun image.

(Beretta Bobcat .22, fires seven shots, weights twelve ounces.  Considered a ladies gun in some circles. Parker never moved in those circles.  Keeps it in a box of Bisquick.  Well, that tracks.  Imagine, if you will, how small it would look in his hand.  Just a tool to him.  Second Amendment?  What’s that?)

The bar is called McW, and it’s never been a runaway success, which is why the man it’s named after keeps resorting to armed robbery.  Parker can see some guys waiting outside in a Chevy Tahoe.  Waiting for the bar to close.  He wants to go over there and start shooting.  He controls it. He goes inside.

Other than McWhitney, there were four men in the bar.  On two stools toward the rear were a pair of fortyish guys in baseball caps, unzippered vinyl jackets, baggy jeans with streaks of plaster dust, and paint-streaked work boots; construction men extending the after-work beer a little too long, by the slow-motion way they talked and lifted their glasses and nodded their heads.

Closer along the bar was an older man in a snap-brim hat and light gray topcoat over a dark suit, with a small pepper-and-salt dog curled up asleep under the stool beneath him as he nursed a bronze-colored drink in a short squat glass and slowly read the New York Sun; a dog walker with an evening to kill.

(That could be me, except for the topcoat, the suit, the snap-brim hat, and I generally prefer a big dog.  Anyway, they don’t let dogs inside the bars in New York anymore.  And I wouldn’t use the Sun to wrap fish, even if it still existed outside cyberspace.  But there’s a time-stamp for you, if you care–that ill-fated rag started up in April 2002, folded a few months before Westlake did.  We already knew this story began after 9/11.  Not long after, going by the rapid response to the bank heist.  Fall of ’02 at the earliest, ’03 at the latest.  That’s where this Triptych begins and ends.)

Parker sees a heavy-set guy sitting alone at a table, in a tweed sports jacket, nursing a glass of club soda.  He’s not making it hard.  Parker tells Nelson he’ll have a beer, and sits down across from the guy.  You can see their initial exchange up top.  You can imagine how it would feel to have an angry Parker staring at you across a table, then shoving a gun into your ribs.  If the guy doesn’t wet himself, it’s only because he’s not drinking beer.

McWhitney comes over, and Parker tells him to take the guy’s gun out of his coat–a .357 Glock.  Size doesn’t matter, if you don’t know how to use it.  Or when.

The inside man being neutralized, McWhitney closes up.  When the coast is clear, Parker goes outside to the Tahoe, and shoots Oscar Sidd dead with the Glock.  The two guys with him decline to take exception to this.  Parker goes back inside, tells the heavy-set man that Oscar’s lying outside with a slug from his gun in him; he might want to do something about that, in case the cops show up.

Parker asks to use McWhitney’s phone, and calls Claire’s cell.  With bridge & tunnel traffic what it is, she’s probably not even  halfway to the city.  Tells her to come back, they’ll have dinner in the area, spend the night.  He’s not angry anymore.  (Horny, one would guess, but Claire can attend to that.)

Next morning, Parker goes to the bar, which is closed, but Nels is there anyway.  He’s reading the Daily News (that’s still around).  Also watching the TV news.  They just found Nick’s body in MA (and a few boxes of cash hidden under hymnals, though they don’t mention that).  So basically, Part Four has all been one long final Stark Rewind.  And it’s not done yet.

Nels is nervous.  About the hymn books he still has, about the truck with Holy Redeemer Choir painted on it, about anything that could link him to what happened over there.  So they deal with all that.  The gent who painted the words on the van is just as happy to paint them out again, no questions asked.  They pack the cash in Hefty bags, and the time passes amicably.  Time to get to the ferry soon.  Five chapters left.

McWhitney didn’t like they were bringing Sandra in for the exchange, but Parker wants somebody on their team who Meany’s people don’t already know about.  He doesn’t say out loud that she’s smarter and more effective than Nels, but that goes without saying at this point. It also helps that they have each others’ cell numbers, and again, Sandra warns of a tail–Oscar’s dead, but the people he brought in as back up aren’t ready to give up yet.

The exchange on the ferry goes fine.  Much smoother than a different mob-related exchange on an elevated subway platform–how many years ago?  Just about forty, going by the calendar, but Parker never paid much attention to those.

Job’s finally done.  They’ve got 200k in cash they can spend.  Parker can get his new ID stamped by Cosmopolitan.  Nels can just tend bar for a while (and maybe become Parker’s new mailbox?)  Sandra can wait for her reward money for Harbin’s body, and spend quality time with her girlfriend on Cape Cod.  And you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?  Not after twenty-four novels.  Three chapters left.

McWhitney has the cash, and figuring to throw the hounds off the trail, says he’ll drive to his place the long way around from Connecticut, while Parker and Sandra take the ferry back to Long Island, and give Meany’s guy his Subaru with the bank money, completing the transaction.  Since the other guys are on the ferry, waiting their chance–oh damn–they got off.  They’re going after Nels.  And they still think he’s got millions.

McWhitney’s not answering his cell.  Sandra’s disgusted, ready to give up.  But there’s one possible way to track these guys–both the Chevy SUVs they used had dealer plates.  They’ve got an in with a dealership.  And Sandra always writes down the license number of any car that takes her interest.  Professional habit.  And she’s got contacts at the DMV.  DeRienzo Chevrolet, Long Island Avenue, Deer Park.

They’ll go over there, have some more diner food, maybe talk a bit more about frozen lakes, and wait for the Chevy to get dropped off.

Sandra frowned at the slow-moving traffic all around the.  They wouldn’t get clear of this herd from the ferry for another half hour or more, when they reached the beginning of the Expressway.  “You’re a strange guy to partner with,” she said.

“So are you.”

“Do me a favor.  Don’t kill anybody.”

“We’ll see.”

This dialogue’s a little too playful, too odd couple buddy action movie for me–Parker as played by Bruce Willis or George Clooney, Sandra maybe Michelle Pfeiffer or Kim Basinger–but hey, that could be fun.  Two chapters left.

When they go into the dealership, they pose as a married couple, looking for a family car, and you know Sandra’s the one selling it.  But seriously, how is this a place some two-bit wiseguys would be able to just show up and and borrow brand new rides with dealer plates to commit crimes with?  Let me just Google ‘organized crime, car dealerships, Long Is–man, that wasn’t hard at all.

Half a dozen car dealers were clustered along both sides of the wide road in this neighborhood, all of them proclaiming, either by banner or by neon sign, OPEN TIL 9!  All the dealerships were lit up like football stadiums, and in that glare the sheets of glass and chrome they featured all sparkled like treasure chests.  This was the heart of car country, servicing the afterwork automotive needs of the bedroom communities.

(And certain other communities, but they don’t put that in the TV ads.)

They wait around almost an hour before the Chevy Suburban shows, and much to their surprise, Nelson’s in the car, still alive.  Parker, the great detective, making his last bow, figures it out.  Sidd told them it was two million bucks.  Nels only had 200k.  They want him to tell them where the rest is.

Here’s the one problem with Sandra.  For all her talk before about how there’s no street, no line for her to cross, she still got raised respectably enough to go to college, she’s at least as much cop as crook, and she doesn’t want to cross the line between crook and killer, if she can help it.  She’d rather just watch the rough stuff, like she did the night of the armored car heist, then pitch in, and lose her cherry.  At some point, she’s going to have to choose, but for the present, Parker tells her to get the car.

McWhitney, no maiden he, makes his move before he sees Parker and Sandra, hitting two of the three guys, and going for the second one’s pistol (this is the same portly guy from the other night, who Parker humiliated–same gun too). The driver fires his gun in the air.  The salesman starts yelling “Not the model!”

Parker grazes the ear of the bulky guy with the Bobcat, McWhitney shoots one of his captors with the captured Glock, gets in the Suburban and drives.  Sandra picks up Parker in her Honda, and they leave, with the salesman still screaming about the damn model.  McWhitney’s headed back to his bar, probably still having no idea who just saved his ass.

They follow, but they don’t know Long Island that well, and may be the last to arrive on the scene.  If you’ve ever been to Long Island, this is totally believable.

Final chapter.  Up ahead of them, Nelson gets out of sight in the traffic.  Behind them, Parker spots the two remaining hoods in their own car (their deal with the dealership is presumably shot to hell, much like the dealership itself).  They seem to be taking a shortcut, and now all Parker and Sandra can do, without the aid of GPS, is get to the bar soon as they can, hope it’s not too late.

It’s all dark on the block when they get there.  The Suburban is parked outside.   The place is locked up, but Sandra’s got a set of lockpicks.  She took a class. Bit out of practice, but she gets them in.  They creep through cautiously, and they can hear Nels being interrogated.  If that’s the word.  Their idea seems to be ‘make him tell us where the  rest of the money is, tell him we’ll give him a share, then his share is a bullet.’  Nels isn’t that dumb.  He passes out.

One of them goes out to get water to revive him, Parker clubs him with the Bobcat, which for all its virtues, isn’t the right tool for that task.  Violence follows.  You’ve seen it before. Sandra tells Parker not to kill anyone if he doesn’t have to.  He already knows that, but guess what?

The bulky guy’s name is apparently Mike.  You know, the one Parker told at the bar that a fat body makes a good silencer if you press the gun right up against it. Right again. Good to know. The other one’s tied up.  Less than two pages left.  One last quote.

“Let’s see what Nels looks like.”

He didn’t look good, but he looked alive, and even groggily awake.  The two guys working him over had been eager but not professional, which meant they could bruise him and make him hurt, but couldn’t do more permanent damage unless they accidentally killed him.  For instance, he still had all his fingernails.

Parker lifted him to his feet, saying “Can you walk?”

“Uuhh.  Where…”

With Parker’s help, McWhitney walked slowly toward the bedroom, as Parker told him, “One of them’s dead in the bar, the other one’s alive right there.  Tomorrow, you can deal with them both.  Right now, you lie down.  Sandra and me’ll split the money and get out of here.”

He helped McWhitney to lie back on the bed, then said to Sandra, “If we do this right, you can get me to Claire’s place by two in the morning.”

“What a good person I am.”

“If you leave me here,” the guy on the floor said, “he’ll kill me tomorrow morning.”

Parker looked at him. “So you’ve still got tonight,” he said.

That’s right.  And that’s all.

So many more questions than answers here.

Greg and I were sort of going round and round in the comments section about this one.  It doesn’t feel like a finale.  So many balls still in the air, many of which only got up there in the very last part of the book.  So yes, it does feel like there’s much more coming.  This dance is not done.

But that final line.  That feels like somebody who knows he’s writing on borrowed time.  And the loan’s about to come due.  And the repo man is parked outside.  That’s how it feels.  That’s how it’s supposed to feel.

Butcher’s Moon was one of the greatest finishes any series ever had, and I don’t just mean crime novels, and I don’t just mean print fiction, and I’m not sure I even need the qualifier.  And yet, decades later, came eight more novels, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on one of them, even Flashfire.  Westlake always said he never meant Butcher’s Moon to be the last one.  It was the last one until the next one, is all.

This finish, by contrast, is quite tame and uncertain by comparison.  And yet it feels more final, if only because we know–it’s the last one.  And we can only decide for ourselves how the story ends, or if.  Abrupt inconclusive conclusions were a Westlake trademark, that Stark shared with him, and this is no exception.

I see Sandra driving Parker back to Colliver Pond.  They head down the LIE (I didn’t pick that acronym), threading the needle through the heart of the city Donald Westlake first saw light in, until they pass the sign saying “Last Exit in New York.”  You miss that turn-off, and guess what?  You’re on the George Washington Bridge.  Next stop New Jersey.

Parker’s eyes are dark, unreadable.  What is he thinking about?  Is he remembering a different trip across that bridge?   Back when he couldn’t afford a car?  But you know, probably not.  You or I would be remembering, so we project that on him.  We think we’re identifying with him.  We think it’s the same thing.

The lights of the city recede behind them, as they head into the northwestern corner of that very misunderstood state.  The sign says “Welcome To Sussex County” and before long they’re at the house.  Claire’s outlined in the doorway as they pull up.  Sandra called her cell.

A brief friendly chat, an offer of sustenance passed up, and Sandra’s headed back to her own Claire, on Cape Cod, with her share.  Her cherry still intact, but for how much longer?  Domesticated on the outside, wild on the inside.  How you gonna keep her down on the farm, now that she’s seen Paree?

Claire and Parker talk softly, and she goes inside.  He puts his split in the garage–Robbins will be getting most of it soon. He’ll need that new identity. He’ll need to work again before long. If he had a billion dollars, he’d still need to work. It’s who he is. It’s what he is. It’s all he is.

He goes out back, to look out on the lake.  It’s the middle of the night, dead quiet, no birds or crickets chirping in the cold.  He hears a rustle by the lakeshore, his eyes, quickly adjusted to the darkness, pick up a shape moving towards him.

Four legs. Bushy tail. Long pointed snout. Two sharp-pointed ears. Two yellow eyes, picking up the ambient light, shining at him. Sharp teeth. Grinning at him. He grins back.  They converse. Without words. Only humans need words.

How’s the hunting been on your side?

Not bad.  Just ate a cat.  Easy kill.  House pet.  I think maybe they turned it loose before they left. Where do they go in the winter, anyway?

Oh, other places.  Cities.  Full of light and noise.  Some of your folk are there too.  You’re better off here, I think.  

No doubt.  But you have to make a living, wherever you are.   You back from a hunt?

Yeah.  A hard one.  Complicated.  It’s always complicated with them.  They don’t know anything about themselves.  But they think they know everything.

Tell me about it.  You think they’ll last much longer? 

Maybe not.  

I, for one, would not miss them.  But I’d miss their cats. And the little dogs. Tasty.

Saw one just the other day you’d have enjoyed.  The big ones can be dangerous, though.

Yeah, I avoid them. Best be on my way. My mate’s waiting.

Mine too.  Good hunting.

Any hunt you survive is good.

That’s right.

They grin again, and the shape fades into the trees.  Parker walks to the back porch door, opens it, is about to go inside.

Then he turns.  He looks around.  Looks right in our direction.  Oh God. He can see us.

He studies us a moment.  He’s thinking to himself. Deciding whether we need to die or not.  Are we a threat?  Nah.  Harmless.  We just like to watch.

There’s amusement in his gaze. Maybe more like contempt.

I hope you people had fun with your words.  No more words now.  Good Night.

And for the very last time, he shuts the door in our faces.

Postscript: That cover image up top, below the two German editions for this book, is the first German edition of The Hunter.  Title translates to Now We’re Even.  Sehr gut! Though personally, I never saw Parker as Cary Grant.  Which begs a question, I suppose.  How do we see him?  Who do we cast in the movie playing in our heads?

Before I get to the next book in our queue–the last book in our queue–why don’t we talk about that a bit.  After all, we still have tonight.

(Part of Friday’s Forgotten Books)

Review: Dirty Money, Part 2

A bum?  Nick edged closer, and was astonished to see it was Parker.

What was Parker doing there?  He had come for the money, no other reason.

So where was his car?  Nick had been on both sides of the road and he hadn’t see any car.  Was it hidden somewhere?  Where?

He hunkered against the wall, across the room from Parker, trying to decide what to do, whether he should go look for the car, or wake Parker up to ask him where it was, or just kill him and keep moving, when Parker came awake.  Nick saw that Parker from the first instant was not surprised, not worried, not even to wake up and find somebody in the room with a gun in his hand.

The covers for the various editions of the final Parker novel are all quite decent, including the first edition from Grand Central.  Rivages turned up a fitting bit of criminal Trompe L’oeil, and we’ll see the usual two alternate takes from Germany next time.

But of the covers I was able to find, I must award top marks to Italy.  Maybe that abandoned chapel is too Gothic-looking for the white clapboard structure in the book (though it is named after a saint), but that somber tableau perfectly captures the underlying mood, even if we can’t be sure the figure standing there in the dark is Parker or Dalesia.  I’m going with Nick.  Guy deserves that much.

Like all Parker novels save one, Dirty Money is divided into four parts, one of which changes POV at least once every chapter, showing us the perspectives of people other than Parker who are in some way relevant to the plot.  Usually, this was Part Three, but in a few instances, it was Part Two, and this is one of those.

Because this book is taking place immediately after the events of the previous two books, there’s a lot of carry-over.  Four of the ten chapters are from the vantage point of a character introduced in Nobody Runs Forever, one from Ask The Parrot.  Only two new POV characters are introduced in Part Two, one cop and one crook, and neither amounts to much in the grand scheme of things.  In Parts Three and Four, a whole new group of players come in, as the story shifts from getting at the stashed loot to unloading and defending it.

I find all this less than satisfyingly organic and well-balanced, compared to most past novels in this series.  More than diverting, all the same.

And I’ve long found it remarkable that Westlake spent the last four or five years of his life working on what turned into three inter-connected books, the collective timeline of which probably runs no more than two or three weeks–not unlike the first four novels in the series, but even more chronologically compressed (and remember, he published the first eight Parker novels in about the same time it took him to come out with the last three.)

If Westlake had lived long enough for a 25th entry, would it have picked up where this left off, turning the Triptych into a Quadriptych?  (Which is what Stark turned the original Triptych into when he wrote The Mourner.)  Don’t you love rhetorical questions?  Almost as much as rambling drawn-out plot synopses, or you wouldn’t be here.  Not wanting to disappoint….

Remember Dr. Myron Madchen?  Who was going to provide Jake Beckham with an alibi for the armored car job?  He needed a share of the loot in order to leave his wife.  When that didn’t work out, he killed his wife, made it look like natural causes, and everybody was so intent on the robbery that he ended up having nothing to do with (because Jake was such a screw-up), a quiet little murder didn’t get much attention.  At no point, mind you, does he ever admit this to anyone, even himself.  But that’s what happened.

He’s preparing to start his new life, with his pretty young girlfriend, who will be leaving her abusive husband for him.  He doesn’t have to leave town now.  He can keep his old practice, his wife’s money, and the big comfortable house her money paid for.  Who says crime doesn’t pay?   He’s made out better from the heist than anybody.  Just one little catch.  His name’s Dalesia.

Nick’s sitting there in his home office, when Madchen turns the light on.  Nick tells him to turn it off.  They have some things to discuss.  Nick needs a place to hide out.  He figures this house will do just fine.  Conveniently, Madchen just gave his maid the week off.  That should be long enough.

If the good doctor won’t play ball with him, and Nick gets grabbed by the law, he’s going to play ball with them–which is going to include letting them know about how Madchen conspired to aid and abet armed robbery.  And maybe they should run an autopsy on the wife, just to be thorough.  But that won’t be necessary, will it?

Nick’s too nice for this gig, you know.  He belongs in a safe cozy Dortmunder novel.  He won’t threaten the doctor’s life in any convincing way (though the doctor thinks for a moment about giving Nick the same injection he gave the wife).  He even agrees not to steal Madchen’s car.  He stays in the room the doctor gives him, makes no trouble, leaves before Estrella the maid comes back–at which point all he asks for is a ride to the church the money is stowed at.  You think Parker would be that cooperative?

Circumstances are less cooperative.  A week wasn’t long enough.  The heat is still on.  Because Nick killed a Federal Marshal.  So now he doesn’t belong in a Dortmunder novel either.   Nowhere left to go.

(When Dr. Madchen drops Nick off, a few chapters further on, we never hear from him again.  There’s no reason to think he won’t live happily ever after with his lovely Isabelle, who is so grateful to him for giving her an escape hatch from her own miserable marriage, she won’t ask any inconvenient questions. Maybe her hurtful hubby will have a few, but we never meet him.

And I don’t think Stark gives a damn about who killed whom, but this doesn’t quite seem like Starkian morality to me.  The doctor got in way over his head, he put up a moral front while dealing with crooks, and he murdered his wife.  He’s not owning any of this. He’s the same weak-willed wuss he always was.  And he’s just going to slide home safe? Was this really the end of his arc?  Or was he going to show up again later, for some form of comeuppance?  In a book that never got written.)

Chapter 2, we meet up once more with Captain Robert Modale, of the New York State Police, the ranking trooper responsible for (among other things) the tiny town of Pooley, where Parker recently had a short profitable stay.  He’s been asked to come down and compare notes, and he thinks it’s a huge waste of time.  He’s staying at Bosky Rounds, where a room has suddenly opened up (safe trip home, Claire).  He sees Sandra, thinks maybe he recognizes her.  Sandra wasn’t in Ask The Parrot, so not sure what that’s about.

He and Reversa hit it off right away.  Both professionals, both observant, both quietly exasperated with the general run of human stupidity.  And best of all, when she first came into the room, looking much too young and pretty to be a detective, somebody introduced her by title, so he didn’t embarrass himself in front of her.

They agree the existing police sketch being used is inadequate.  Modale never questioned Parker as Reversa did, but he saw him in the course of the manhunt for the bank robber, that the bank robber ended up joining.  They join forces to come up with a more lifelike portrait.

The artist was a small irritable woman who worked in charcoal, smearing much of it on herself.  “I think,” Gwen Reversa told her, “the main thing wrong with the picture now is that it makes him look threatening.”

“That’s right,” Captain Modale said.

The artist, who wasn’t the one who’d done the original drawing, frowned at it.  “Yes, it is threatening,” she agreed.  “What should it be instead?”

“Watchful,” Gwen Reversa said.

“This man,” the captain said, gesturing at the picture, “is aggressive, he’s about to make some sort of move.  The real man doesn’t move first.  He watches you, he waits to see what you’re going to do.”

“But then,” Gwen Reversa said, “I suspect he’s very fast.”

“Absolutely.”

The artist pursed her lips.  “I’m not going to get all that into the picture.  Even a photograph wouldn’t get all that in.  Are the eyes all right?”

“Maybe,” Gwen Reversa said, “not so defined.”

“He’s not staring,” the captain said.  “He’s just looking.”

The artist signed.  “Very well,” she said, and opened her large sketch pad on the bank officer’s desk in this small side office next to the main HQ room.  “Let’s begin.”

Terry Mulcany shows up, talks about how he saw this man with this very good-looking woman, and the man kind of resembled the face on the wanted posters.  He can’t remember the name of the place he saw them at.  They show him the new sketch.  Bingo.

Time to check on Nelson McWhitney, still back on Long Island, who has obtained and customized a small truck, as Sandra suggested in Part One.  Soon he’ll be heading over to New England, but having a bit of time to kill, decides to set up a failsafe–in case he’s the only one who comes back from this trip, with all the cash.  He talks to a guy he knows, connected, named Oscar Sidd.  Tells him about the money.  Suggests that Oscar’s connections could arrange for the cash to be laundered.

This is dumb, of course.  Nels is not one of Life’s Deep Thinkers.  Naturally suspicious of everyone, which would be fine, but then why is he confiding in Oscar Sidd?  He insists he’s not planning a cross–but he’s talking as if somehow the whole pile might fall into his hands.  Maybe Parker and Sandra will try to cross him, and  he’ll be forced to kill them.  Yeah, and then he’ll turn out to be heir to the throne of Narnia.  C’mon.

Next chapter is from Terry Mulcany’s POV, and he’s so excited.  He’s going to have a really fantastic book to write about this true crime he helped solve.  (Working title: The Land Pirates.)  This chapter is only of interest because we learn the fate of Tom Lindahl, or rather, what fate he didn’t have.  Parker wondered, at the end of the last book, how far Tom would get.  Pretty far, as it turned out.

Detective Reversa asked “Tom Lindahl?  Who’s he?”

“A loner,” Modale said, “just about a hermit, living by himself in a little town over there.  For years he was a manager in charge of upkeep, buildings, all that, at a racetrack near there.  He got fired for some reason, had some kind of grudge.  When this fellow Ed Smith came long, I guess it was Tom’s opportunity at last to get revenge.  They robbed the track together.”

Detective Reversa said, “But they’re not still together.  You don’t think Lindahl came over here.”

“To tell you the truth,” Modale said, “I thought we’d pick up Lindahl within just two or three days.  He has no criminal record, no history of this sort of thing, you’d expect him to make nothing but mistakes.”

“Maybe,” Detective Reversa said, “our robber gave him a few good tips for hiding out. Unless, of course, he killed Lindahl once the robbery was done.”

“It doesn’t look that way,” Modale said. “They went in late last Sunday night, overpowered the guards, and made off with nearly two hundred thousand dollars in cash.  None of it traceable, I’m sorry to say.”

He ditched his car in Lexington Kentucky, near the bus station there.  Modale says he could be anywhere in the country by now, working on a new identity for himself.  Not living in anything like luxury, of course.  ~100k is not retirement money, and would he be able to get Social Security checks under a false name?  (Joe Sheer did.)

Point is, he got free.  Stark wants us to know that.  It wasn’t about the money for Lindahl, or even revenge; it was about leaving a failed life behind, starting fresh.  100k’s enough for that.  Well-earned, after the system failed him so badly.  All Terry can see is the sheer romance of it–but not, to his disappointment, the ‘triumph of the law at the end of the day’, so essential to any True Crime story.  Well no, and that didn’t happen with the corrupt track owners who screwed Tom and the entire legal system over, either.  But that’s a bit out of his journalistic niche, isn’t it.

Chapter 5 tells us Oscar Sidd is tailing McWhitney in his nondescript little sedan.  Nels may not be planning a cross, but he is.

Nothing much happens in Chapter 6, except Modale and Reversa part on terms of mutual respect and a shared desire that this Allen/Smith/Whoever gets locked up soon.  Terry tells Gwen he remembered the place he saw the guy had something to do with pears.  It’s on a date with her lawyer friend that she figures that out.  Bartlett.  Bosky Rounds.  (For all we know, Terry was thinking of Bosc pears, but never mind.)

Chapter 7 introduces us to Trooper Louise Rawburton, and her partner, Danny Oleski.  They’re being told by a superior that the roadblocks aren’t enough, and now they’re going to actively search for both the robbers and the presumably stashed loot from the robbery.  Louise and Danny have been assigned, among other things, to check out St. Dympna.  Sounds a bit sacrilegious, but I’ll bite–who her?

“She was supposed to be Irish.  Most churches with saints’ names are Roman Catholic, but we weren’t.  We were United Reformed.  Louise laughed and said, “The funny thing is, when they founded the church, they just wanted some unusual name to attract attention, so they picked St. Dympna, and then, too late, they found out she’s actually the patron saint of insanity.”

Danny looked at her.  “You’re putting me on.”

“I am not.  Turned out, there’s a mental hospital named for her in Belgium.  When I was a kid, that was the coolest thing, our church was named for the patron saint of crazy people.”

(There’s supposed to be an ‘h’ in her name somewhere, but you know Protestants–always editing things out.)

Chapter 8, Reversa shows up at Bosky Rounds, with the new improved wanted posters, and after she’s left, Mrs. Bartlett is forced to acknowledge that one of the robbers was a guest of hers in the near past.  Henry Willis.  And that lovely Claire Willis.  Mrs. Bartlett thought Henry was a sourpuss, but she adored Claire.

She wrestles with her conscience a while, and decides not to drop a dime on them.  It would be embarrassing to admit a bank robber was under her roof, for one thing.  But for another, she just can’t bring herself to get that sweet girl in trouble.  And this is why you should always be extra nice to people who work in the hospitality trade, folks.  Parker used to know that.  I guess having Claire means he doesn’t have to put up a pleasant affable front in hotels and such anymore.  That must be excruciating for him.

Chapter 9 is all Loscalzo/McWhitney, and I must say, it’s a delight.  They rub each other in just the right wrong way (she’s so simpatico with Parker, there’s no friction there at all).  She knows he got an Econoline van, dark green, good enough, and had the name of the ersatz church choir painted on it.  He does not know she’s decided to tail him all the way there in her car.

Good thing she did.  She spots the other tail–Oscar Sidd.  She knows all about nondescript vehicles as camouflage, and she knows a tail when she sees it.   She and Nels, being more techno-friendly than Parker, both have cellphones.  They exchanged numbers, and man this is getting modern!  Next thing you know they’ll be texting each other.  Not sure about FaceTime.

We get a little background on her as they drive–she did go to college, got her P.I. license shortly after she left (doesn’t say graduated–Westlake didn’t get the sheepskin either).  She worked the respectable side of her business a while, and found it deadly dull.  Roy Keenan was happy to show her the ropes of bounty hunting, then take credit for her brains.  She thought it was a good partnership, and she’s not the least bit sad that it’s over, because what would be the point?  Parker with a bit of polish (and not just on her nails).

Anyway, she’s got to deal with this shoofly. Better call Nels.

“You’ve got a tin can on your tail, you know about that?

“What?  Where are you?”

“Listen to me,  Nelson.  He’s in a nothing little car, two behind you.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Tall bony guy in black, looks like he’s never had a good meal in his life.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“You know him, I take it.  Pal of yours?”

“Not any more.”

He offers to swat the fly, but she tells him keep the truck clean, she’ll handle the mess.  She gets out ahead of them both, and lies in wait, with her Taurus Tracker .17HMR–like Parker, she knows the value of the right tool for the job at hand.  A .45 for intimidation factor.  For a job like this, you want precision, which means a long barrel.  Might as well post an image.

Puts one right in Sidd’s tire as he goes by.  He loses control, knocks himself out on the windshield.  She and Nelson drive on to the church, and as they get there, they hear a shot.  This is where we came in.  Stark Rewind time.  With a twist.

Chapter 10 is from Dalesia’s perspective, and it’s not a happy one.  He’s on the run from the cops and  his former partners.  He’s looking into Parker’s eyes, there in the church, and all he can see is death.  Parker threw the water bottle, then he threw the mat he was using as a blanket, then he threw himself.  The bullet misses.

Parker knocks the gun out of Dalesia’s hand, and now his hands are reaching for Nick’s throat. Those huge veiny hands. Every guy who works with Parker has probably thought about what those hands would feel like, wrapped around his throat.  Nick would rather not find out.  He jumps through a closed window to the ground below.  And that’s Part Two.

McWhitney and Loscalzo come up, one after the other, to hear the sad story.  Parker had Nick, but he was too stiff after sleeping on that floor, let him go.  He’s cut from the glass, no gun, no car, no money, cops everywhere.  If they don’t find him, the law will, and any faint hope he wouldn’t spill his guts about McWhitney and Parker is gone now.  So they have to spill his guts for him, or start prepping for some serious lifestyle changes.

While Sandra gets the van ready to receive its cargo, Parker and Nels do a quick search, come up empty.  No more time, have to get the money out.  Boxes of bills, covered with a layer of hymnals.  Also a few boxes that are just hymnals, in case they get stopped.  Have to leave some cash behind.  C’est la guerre.

Parker says he needs to go back into the church.  He doesn’t say why.  He saw mud on the floor that wasn’t there before.  Dalesia’s hiding in the basement.  Parker has the gun now, but Nick has one last card to play–the cops are outside.  No silencer on that gun.  Stalemate, right?

Wrong.  He forgot about the hands.  This time they find the neck.  Bye, Nick.

This is a significant moment in the series, that isn’t treated as such.  Parker has killed a lot of his colleagues in the past twenty-three books.  He’s never been forced to kill one who didn’t cross him on a job, cheat him of his share, or try to kill him.  Nick did just shoot at him, but that’s as clear-cut a case of self-defense as ever there was.  And, you know, he could have said they’d smuggle him out in the van–but the cops have his photograph.  He’s got a target on his chest the rest of his life.  Which isn’t saying much anymore.

Nick Dalesia was a solid pro, a likable guy.  Not a nice guy.  Not in that profession.  But is he–pardon, was he–any worse than Handy McKay, Alan Grofield, Dan Wycza, Salsa, Mike Carlow, Stan Devers, or Ed Mackey?  Nope.  A bit more mellow, I’d say.  And would Parker have hesitated to kill any of those old amigos, if they were standing where Nick was just now?  Nope.  Is Parker getting soft in these final books?  Hell nope.  He is maybe crossing a line here.  Nick crossed it first, when he killed that marshal.  Romanticism only gets you so far in the 21st century.  Sorry, Nick.

Parker hides the body, goes back outside.  Sandra is playing the friendly choir director (there are going to be some things she does better than Parker, having lived in the straight world so long, and this is one of them). Parker’s name is now Desmond.  “I’m in recovery,” he lies.  For a guy who has never lived in the straight world, he’s not bad, you know?

The cops are, of course, Louise and Danny, and Louise is so happy and nostalgic about the place.  She totally believes Sandra belongs to some church choir that rehabilitates people who had a tough break. She’s so pleased when Sandra gives her a hymn book as a keepsake.  And Parker is so pleased to learn the roadblocks have been lifted.

The ride back to Long Island is not as uneventful as hoped.  McWhitney gets stopped once along the way, so good thing they didn’t do what he wanted, and dump the hymnals to make room for the last few boxes of cash.  Parker learns what happened with Oscar Sidd from Sandra, and he knows Nelson was at least half-thinking about a cross.  Not enough to push that button in Parker’s head, but the button is still there, waiting.

Sandra drops him at a motel, where he and McWhitney will watch the cash, before getting the rest of the way back.  Parker tells her it’s safe for her girlfriend to come home.  They’re getting pretty cozy, those two.  For wolves who just met on a frozen lake.

Parker and Nels have a drink at the motel bar, and talk strategy.  They’ve got the money, and don’t feel like waiting a decade or so to spend it, so they need somebody with overseas connections, who can make it disappear, and give them a decent percentage.  Oscar Sidd has proven  himself less than trustworthy.  Parker knows somebody else–not trustworthy.  More solid, better connected.  And there’s a relationship there.  Not what you’d call a friendly one, but as Parker told Sandra in the car, he doesn’t have friends.

Let’s skip over the preliminaries in Chapter 7 (okay, just this much–“Who shall I say is calling?”  “Parker.” “Is that all?”  “He’ll know.”), and cut ahead to the meet.  Northern NJ, state park, picnic area, right in front of a park police headquarters.  Neutral turf.  Frank Meany.  Cosmopolitan Beverages. You know, the people who sent their Russian hitman to kill Parker, at Paul Brock’s behest, only things did not work out as planned.   At one point Parker had a gun to Meany’s head, and that definitely wasn’t part of Meany’s plan.  Now Meany’s wondering what plans this guy has.  He’s wondering even more at the size of the balls on this guy.  But he’s no slouch himself.

Meany said a word to the driver, then came on, as the driver got back behind the wheel and put the Daimler just beyond the red pickup.  A tall and bulky man with a round head of close-cropped hair, Meany was a thug with a good tailor, dressed today in pearl-gray topcoat over charcoal-gray slacks, dark blue jacket, pale blue shirt and pale blue tie.  Still, the real man shone through the wardrobe, with his thick-jawed small-eyed face, and the two heavy rings on each hand, meant not for show for for attack.

Meany approached Parker with a steady heavy treat, stopped on the other side of the picnic table, but did not sit down.  “So here we are,” he said.

“Sit,” Parker suggested.

Meany did so, saying, “You’re not gonna object to the driver?”

“He gets out of the car,” Parker said, “I’ll do something.”

“Deal.  Same thing for your friend in the pickup.”

“Same thing.  You didn’t bring a sandwich.”

“I ate lunch.”

Parker shook his head, irritated.  As he took his sandwich out of the bag and ripped the bag in half to make two paper plates, he said, “People who ride around in cars like that one there forget how to take care of themselves.  If I’m looking at you out of one of those windows over there, and you’re not here for lunch, what are you here for?”

“An innocent conversation,” Meany said, and shrugged.

“In New Jersey?”  Parker pushed a half sandwich on a half bag to Meany, then took a bite of the remaining half.

(It’s official.  Everybody makes jokes about Jersey.)

So while they each chew on half a Reuben, Parker lays out his business proposition.  He’s not saying he did that armored car robbery, but if he was, he’d want ten cents on the dollar. 200k.  Meaning they’ve got two million.  (I’m not sure that matches up with what we were told in Nobody Runs Forever, or with the fact that they had to leave some cash behind at the church, and there’s some more dubious accounting ahead, but it’s the last book, the author’s dead, what are you gonna do, demand an audit?)

They reach a tentative agreement (you might go so far as to call it tenuous, tense, tendentious, or even tenebrous.)  Meany will go talk to his boss.  Parker has no boss, and he doesn’t talk to himself.

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, which is the name of the last chapter in Part Three, Louise and Danny are passing St. Dympna’s again, and she just has to go in and check it out this time.  Oh no, the church group left some of the hymnals behind! Maybe they can give them to charity.  That would be some lucky charity. They’re still absorbing the full terrifying implications of their fuck-up, when Danny smells something funny.  Or someone.

Reversa has been working on a different case, relating to a wealthy Chinese couple keeping undocumented Chinese immigrants as defacto slaves.  They bring her in to hear the sad news.  All that good professional work she put in.  Undone by some unprofessional work done further down the chain of command.  The troopers never even took down the name of that guy who showed them his license–Mac-something?

She sighs to herself.  She really thought they’d get him, and now she’s got to tell Modale that their quarry has slipped through the net yet again.  It’s been nine days.  John B. Allen?  Might as well call him Long John.  Because he’s long gone.

She’s a good hunter, but she didn’t quite understand what she was chasing.  She refers to him as a cat at one point.  Right track.  Wrong family.

That’s all we see of Gwen Reversa, or Massachusetts.  The loose ends from Nobody Runs Forever have all been tied up neatly.  Parker has come to an arrangement that should deal with the one remaining loose end, that of the serial numbers on the stolen bills.  The book could end right here, at page 192.  But the thing about loose ends is, they proliferate.  In literature, and life.

Not at 5,000 words yet.  I could wrap things up now, without going on longer than I have in past.  But what follows, in Part Four, is a story all to itself, and merits special treatment.  With regard to what’s come before, it’s more of a coda than a conclusion–long enough for a novella, which I’m half-inclined to refer to it as.  And it seems to me that Stark was laying the groundwork for more Parker stories.  That we’ll never read.

Because he’s long gone.

Review: Dirty Money

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Through the chill of winter
Running across a frozen lake
Hunters are out on his trail
All odds are against him
With a family to provide for
The one thing he must keep alive
Will the wolf survive?

Louie Perez and David Hidalgo

When the silver Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel.  The Infiniti jerked forward toward the river as the Toyota slewed around behind it to a stop.  Parker picked up the full duffel bag from where he’d tossed it on the ground, and behind him, the Infiniti rolled down the slope into the river, all its windows open; it slid into the gray dawn water like a bear into a trout stream.

Parker carried the duffel in his arms and Claire got out of the Toyota to open its rear door and say, “Do you want to drive?”

“No.  I’ve been driving.” He heaved the duffel onto the backseat, then got around to take the passenger side in front.

Before getting behind the wheel, she stood looking toward the river, a tall slender ash-blonde in black slacks and a bulky dark red sweater against the October chill.  “It’s gone,” she said.

“Good.”

There.  I’ve done it.  Typed out the final opening from the final Parker novel.  I don’t usually start a review that way.  Seemed to fit here.  But where does this book fit into what is now and will ever remain, a twenty-four book epic?  One novel for each hour in the day.  Not planned.  Destined, maybe.

Not half as good as the one leading into it.  To be blunt, I’d be hard-pressed to rank it in the top twenty.  Flashfire is still the worst.  The best? I could say The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, The Score, The Jugger, The Seventh, The Rare Coin Score, The Green Eagle Score, The Sour Lemon Score,  Deadly Edge, Slayground, Butcher’s Moon, Breakout, or yeah, Ask The Parrot–and mean it every time.  This dark horse is out of the running, in either race.  Neither best nor worst–it’s the last.  For that alone, attention must be paid.

Much of what you find in it is more than good.  It contains many crisp clean clarified currents of prose, like what you just read up top.  Stark can still write like no one else.  But he seems a little confused here, as to what he’s writing about, and to what end.  Maybe because he knows, on a molecular level–this is the end. Nobody runs forever.  Whatever may become of Parker, Mr. Westlake’s string has almost run out, and Stark can’t go on without Westlake.  Anymore than Westlake could have gone on this long without Stark. Package deal.

The book is saying hello and goodbye at the same time; finishing arcs begun in Nobody Runs Forever, and in books before that–and starting new arcs, which we’ll never see the end of, can only speculate about.  It’s designed to be a pivot for the series, but it’s a pivot to nowhere, which I suppose is a fair description of death.

About the title.   I never liked it.  Always wondered what the point of it was.  How is this money any dirtier than what came before?  Because the bills from the bank are new, the law has the serial numbers, and Parker has to find a way to negotiate this marked moolah.  So the problem isn’t that it’s dirty, but that it’s too damn clean.  I guess you could say the money he’s going to get in place of it is dirty.  Or that all money is, by definition.  (Would Filthy Lucre be a better title?  Not for this franchise.)

The overseas market liked the title well enough, since every foreign language edition I’ve found translates it literally.  What you can say for certain is that for the second time in this Triptych, Westlake is consciously recycling the title of a foreign-made crime film.  Not the original title.  The American release title.  Huh.

I’m a longtime admirer of Jean Pierre Melville, Prince of the Nouvelle Vague.  (Wait for Godard all you like.)  His final film, Un Flic (aka Dirty Money) is not one of my favorites, in part because it’s so hard to see a decent print.  First time we rented a (bad) video of it, it was for Deneuve, and she was barely in it.

The dialogue can get a bit too vague, and it’s not tres nouvelle.  The scene with the toy helicopter and the model train is cheesy. He didn’t have the budget to pull the visual off, and maybe he didn’t care–these days, they’d be using CGI, and I’d be yapping about that.  I should probably give it another chance–great cast, some beautiful moments, and with Melville, it’s easy to miss the point.  He’s always got one.  But he hides it under a smoke screen of crime fiction.  Like Stark.  And he’s all about identity.  Like Westlake.

Catherine Deneuve doesn’t have a big role in Un Flic, but she’s still a key player in it–same thing could be said of Claire–who for the first and only time in this series is said to be a blonde–no more born that way than Deneuve.  Claire’s a redhead in Nobody Runs Forever.  No hint of her tint in any other book.  I’m going to go on thinking of her as brunette, and go on wondering why Westlake chose to bring up her hair color twice in the Triptych, after four decades of never mentioning it.

You can’t tell me he didn’t know the Melville film, a noir-inflected bank job yarn that feels more Starkian than anything Hollywood ever cranked out, allowing for the usual dose of existential fatalism that won’t let us have our cake and eat it too.  As with The High Commissioner/Nobody Runs Forever, there’s no direct influence.  But I don’t think this is a coincidence.  Knowing what something isn’t doesn’t prove you know what it is, so that’s enough about the title.

So how about the dedication?  Most Parker novels have none–the two previous books in the Triptych didn’t.  But here, before the title page, we get “This is for Dr. Quirke, and his creator–two lovely gents.”  I’m disappointed at how easy this case was to crack.  Dr. Quirke is the creation of John Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.  A mystery solving pathologist, hopefully less annoying than Quincy M.E. (I’ll find out at some point).  He and Westlake sort of interviewed each other for Newsweek.  Good bit of craic there.

One more thing before we get down to it. After a long rewarding stint at The Mysterious Press, the last two Westlake novels–the final Parker, the final Dortmunder–were put out by Grand Central Publishing.  A division of Hachette.

So let me get this straight.   Westlake’s two most famous characters departed this world via the auspices of a publishing imprint named after a world famous point of departure, under the umbrella of a huge media corporation, the name of which looks like a synonym for ax?  And people bitch about the contrivances in fiction.  The world is not simple enough to understand.  This book might be, so let’s talk about that.

Avalon meets Infiniti by a river (not subtle, still pretty).  Infiniti having been ditched, Parker and Claire head back to their personal Avalon by Colliver Pond, so he can take a short siesta, after which he needs her to drive him to Nelson McWhitney’s bar on Long Island, to talk about Nick Dalesia.  Who is now a major problem, because as Claire tells Parker, he escaped while being transferred to Federal custody–killing a marshal as he went.  The one thing that gets cops most focused on you–when you kill one of them.

Minor continuity error here–not the last in this book.  Parker says they grabbed Dalesia yesterday.  Yesterday he was pulling a heist with Tom Lindahl.  The day before yesterday, he met Tom Lindahl, and was going to pass on the heist Tom proposed, until he saw the news about Dalesia’s capture on TV.  Parker’s tired, sure.  He can make mistakes.  So can crime fiction authors in their 70’s.  (Or crime fiction bloggers at any age, but I’m right about this.)

We get one last physical description, elusive as always--“a big ropy man who looked squeezed into the Toyota.”  (Avalons are full-sized sedans, and he’s in the front passenger seat, so very big and ropy.)

Claire is taken aback when Parker offhandedly reveals that he pulled a second heist while on the run from the first one.  A long heavy duffel, crammed with untraceable cash.  Unlike the very traceable cash still hidden at the church in Massachusetts.  If they’re going to get that, find some way to fence it, they need to move, and soon.

Parker doesn’t trust the makeshift ID Lindahl made for him, useful as it was over the past two days.  His better-quality fake ID that he used in Massachusetts is now known to the law, worse than useless.  He’s got to get new papers, a new identity.  He’s coming to grips with the fact that things have changed, and it’s harder to slip through the cracks than it used to be.

For him to go on operating in this brave new digital world, he’s going to need 100% top-drawer ID work done.  Which is going to cost him.  So we’re back where we started, but with a switch.  In the first book, he made his own driver’s license at the DMV, forging the official stamp with a ballpoint pen, and he could open a bank account with it.  In the second book, it was plastic surgery.  Now, in the final book, it’s just a better grade of plastic.  That will hold up to all but the most intense scrutiny.

As they drive out to Long Island, late in the day, he fills her in on what’s happened since he last saw her, which involves obliquely mentioning that there’s been a fair bit of premature mortality going on, which has always been the part of Parker’s life she didn’t want to know about.  She’s been loosening up on this rule more and more, but he’s still surprised when she says she wants to come into the bar–same bar where Roy Keenan was murdered, by the bar’s proprietor. Not that he told her that, but she’s got more than an inkling.

Sandra Loscalzo is there, still trying to get her reward money for Harbin.  McWhitney gave her the location of the body, she’s waiting to hear if it was found.  If it isn’t, she figures she can turn Parker and McWhitney in for a reward.  She’s real upfront about that.  I’d say she takes no prisoners, except that’s exactly what she does.  Dead or alive.

They’re all sizing each other up, distrust running in more than one direction, but Sandra’s the odd woman out, since she’s the only one who talks to the law.  Claire makes it clear that if the cops come to her door, she knows how to lie, and men love hearing her lie.  Sandra’s hand is in her pocket while she’s talking.  She knows Parker isn’t going to let her walk out of there if she’s going to the law. She respects that.  But she’s getting her money.  One way or the other.  He respects that.  Impasse.

Sandra has an idea about the bank money–why doesn’t she go get it?  For a share, of course.  Parker points out that even though there’s no warrant out on her, the cops could be sitting on the cash, waiting to see who comes for it–and if they get her, they’ll get everything she knows. The impasse is put on hold when she gets a callback–they found Harbin.  Everybody leaves, and Nels locks up.

Next day, Parker stashes the cash from the track, and comes back to see FBI agents are paying Claire a little social call.  They are following up on a lead–Nick Dalesia called the house, several times.  She convinces them she doesn’t know the man, he was never there, and they leave. No mention of her brother, Mr. John B. Allen, now wanted for bank robbery.  No mention of a Lexus registered to her, that he was driving, and she reported stolen.

So you can justify this by different law-enforcement bureaucracies not playing well together–still a thing, even today–or say that these hunters are being patient.  Or you can say that the justifications are getting too hard to justify.  Too much work to make it work.

In fairness, the area around the house is deserted–the summer people are gone–nobody else there the G-Men can talk to, about any gentlemen callers the charming Ms. Willis might have.  But you have to figure that they’re going to find out she was connected, under a different last name, to the armed robbery of a coin collector’s convention in Indianapolis.  (How many years ago?  A lady never tells.)

It’s getting to the point where the house in New Jersey is getting impossible to justify.  Parker accepted, long ago, that the house was essential to Claire, and she was essential to him, so they’ve done a lot of workarounds.  This book seems to be the beginning of where it becomes impossible to make it work anymore.  Something’s got to give.  (Turned out to be Westlake’s ticker.)

But whether or not the Bureau suspects Claire of harboring a hardened criminal (one way of putting it), something has to be done about that money.  Something has to be done about Dalesia.  Both are to be found near a small town in northwestern Massachusetts.  Parker needs to be there.  He needs Claire to make him look like a tourist–a leaf peeper, as they say. No fleabag motel this time. Best look extra-legit.  They’ll check into a bed and breakfast.

“You folks here for the robbery?”

The place was called Bosky Rounds, and the pictures on the website had made it look like somewhere Hansel and Gretel might have stopped off.  Deep eaves, creamy stucco walls, broad dark green wooden shutters flanking the old-fashioned multipaned windows, and a sun god knocker on the front door. The Bosky Rounds gimmick, though they wouldn’t have used the word, was that they offered maps of nearby hiking trails through the forest, for those leaf peepers who would like to be surrounded by their subject.  It was the most rustic and innocent accommodation Claire could find, and Parker had agreed it was perfect for their purposes.

Mrs. Bartlett, the matronly owner of this twee establishment, bears a marked resemblance to Mrs. Krutchfield, proprietress of The Sewing Kit B&B in upstate New York, who appeared in Westlake’s Smoke.

This being Stark, not Westlake, the comic elements are more muted, but still present.  She’s all agog about the bank robbery (she doesn’t come out and say it will give a little boost to business, but she’s thinking it).  Keeps talking about how they used bazookas, and Parker refrains from saying they were Carl-Gustafs. Same basic kind of tool, what does he care?

The idea of Claire being there is not only that she’s got real ID she can get through roadblocks with, but that she’s such a stunner, the cops will be looking at her, not Parker, so they won’t be comparing him to that sketch on the wanted posters.  This theory is put to the test when they meet Terry Mulcany, a freelance journalist who does ‘true crime’ books.

He’s there interviewing anybody he can find who knows anything about the bank job.  He’s so busy chatting up Claire, he doesn’t notice Parker, who is standing right there.  While Parker is thinking about what he’s going to do to this guy if he ever does notice something besides Claire (but that, again, is one of the great advantages of having Claire around).

Under the pretext of driving to a local seafood restaurant, they pass the church twice–no sign of surveillance.  They get back, and Sandra Loscalzo is now ensconced at Bosko Rounds.  Different kind of surveillance.  She suggests they go have a few drinks together.

Sandra’s problem was not solved by finding Harbin’s remains, because there were so many law enforcement agencies after him, offering money for him (dead or alive), that they now need to work out whose budget line Sandra’s money comes out of.  This is the kind of shop talk Parker likes, because it means there’s still cracks in the system for him to slip through.  This may be The Information Age he’s living in now, but more information means more confusion.

So she again points out that she could expose Parker, and he again points out that he could kill her and her girlfriend in Cape Cod, who Sandra says has gone on a little holiday (which when you think about it, is exactly what Claire does when Parker is involved in something extra-heavy.)

Claire dusts off her diplomatic skills, and the way it works out is Sandra just wants a taste of the bank money–not all of Nick’s share–just half of it.  She could be useful.  Parker can’t deny that.  But he’s nowhere close to trusting her.  And he knows she’s going to try and follow them when they leave the bar.  Which makes it not too difficult to shake her in the dark–at which point he goes to check out the church, while Claire drives around in circles, ready to pick him up.

The money’s still there, hidden under hymnals.  Nobody sitting on it.  No cops, no Dalesia. Good.  And when he gets back to Bosky Rounds, Sandra is there on the porch.  She knows he’s been checking on their money.  And he acknowledges, verbally, that part of it is hers.  Her offer has been accepted.

In this same chapter, while they’re driving to the church, Parker makes it clear that if the Feds get any more interested in her, they’re both going to have to leave Colliver Pond for good.  Claire says that if she has to abandon her house, change her name, go back to living like a gypsy all year, she’ll do it.  She won’t like it.  Parker will go further out on a limb for her than anyone (in that he will go out on a limb for her at all).  So he’s still holding out hope that the exodus can be averted.  Whether he believes that is another matter.  (Speaking as a reader, I don’t.  The house is already half-burned.  At least.)

Now it’s time for the other good-looking nosy blonde in this Triptych to reemerge.  Detective Gwen Reversa, of the MA state police.  She comes into Bosky Rounds at breakfast time, making her rounds, and Parker has Claire block his face with her newspaper.  Sandra notices all this from her vantage point, figures out what it means.

As she figures out what Parker means, when he asks Mrs. Bartlett for directions to a scenic overview of the area, while she is sitting right there listening.  He wants a meet.  Up at the lookout, the three of them discuss the options.  Parker has to leave the B&B.  Claire has to stay, keep up a front.  And Sandra will drive Parker back to Long Island, so they can bring McWhitney into the picture.

Sandra gets them there by mid-afternoon. McWhitney, not the most chivalrous guy you’ll ever meet, will not say he’s pleased to see her, though a pleasing sight she remains. Thought they’d concluded their business when she got her body (and he knows he’s never getting hers). Nor is he pleased she’s getting a split of the take.

But as they fill him in, he realizes there’s no choice, other than letting it all go.  And while she’s in a different business than them, she’s got a talent for planning, logistics, finding cracks to slip through  Again, reminding me of someone.  Point is–

Parker said, “You’ve figured out a way to get our money out.”

“I think so.” To McWhitney she said, “You pretty well know the business operations around this neighborhood.”

“Pretty well.”

“Do you know a used-car lot, maybe kind of grungy, no cream puffs?”

McWhitney grinned for the first time since he’d laid eyes on Sandra.  “I know a dozen of them,” he said.  “Whadayou need?”

“A truck.  A small beat-up old truck, delivery van, something like that.  Black would be best, just so it isn’t too shiny.”

“A truck.” McWhitney sounded disgusted.  “To move the stash.”

“That’s right.”

“What makes this truck so wonderful?  It’s invisible?

“Pretty much so,” she said.  “Whatever color it is, and I really would like it black, we use the same color to paint out whatever name might already be on it.  Then, on both doors, in white, we paint Holy Redeemer Choir.”

“Holy shit,” McWhitney said.

“We’re the redeemers,” Sandra told him.  “It’s okay if the name on the doors is a bit amateurish, but we should try to do our best with it.”

McWhitney slowly nodded.  “The choir’s coming to get their hymnals.”

“And we’ll get some, too,” Sandra said, “in case anybody wants to look in back.”

“Jesus, you always gotta insult me,” McWhitney said.  “Here I was thinking you weren’t so bad.”

“I was used to dealing with Roy,” she said, and shrugged.

McWhitney says she should thank him for breaking up the partnership, i.e., knocking Roy’s brains out with a baseball bat.  She doesn’t bat an eye.  Who is this broad?

We get a serious clue, as she and Parker stop to eat on their way back.  He’s noticing that she’s not quite like the people he usually deals with.  She’s more like–well–him.  But unlike him, she’s living in the straight world, catching crooks, working with the law.  And now she’s throwing in with bank robbers.  He needs to know she knows what she’s doing here.  Who she is.  What she is.

While they waited for their food, Parker said, “This whole thing is the wrong side of the street for you.”

Sandra grimaced.  “I don’t think of it like that,” she said.  “What I think, there’s no sides to the street because there is no street.”

“What is there?”

She studied him, trying to decide how much to tell him, moving her fork back and forth on the table with her left hand. Then she shrugged, and left the fork alone, and said, “I figured it out when I was a little girl, what my idea of the world is.”

“What’s that?”

“A frozen lake,” she said.  “Bigger than you can see the end of.  Every day, I get up, I gotta move a little more along the lake.  I gotta be very careful and very wary, because I don’t know where the ice is too thin.  I gotta listen and watch.”

“I’ve seen you do it.”

She grinned and nodded, as though more pleased with him than herself.  “Yeah, you have.”

They were both silent a minute, and then their food came.  The waitress went away and Sandra picked up her fork, but then she paused to say, “You go see a war movie, the guy gets hurt, he yells ‘Medic!’, they come to take him away, fix him up.  Out here, you get hurt, you yell ‘Medic!’, you know what happens?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There’s no sides,” she said.  “No street.  We just do what we’ve got to do to get across the lake.”

I can’t imagine a more perfect metaphor for how Parker lives his life.  If he gave a damn about metaphors, neither could he.  (And as Greg just reminded me, he trotted out that exact metaphor in The Green Eagle Score,  though he was a lot less wordy about it.  Maybe Sandra had a year or two of college on her lake.)

And what you have to ask–what he’s asking himself, as he listens to her–is she like him?  Is it possible he’s not alone in this insane world after all?  She figured all this out when she was a child.  As he must have done.  When you’re that different, you figure it out early.  And you start figuring out how to make that work for you.  Because you don’t have any choice.

Like him, she lives from score to score.  Like him, she returns to a woman and a house after each score.  Like him, she hides what she really is, blends into the herd, because she can never have a pack.

But she went another way with it.  Makes sense.  Maybe he could have gone that way, in a different life, a different time.  Right now, she’s starting to go his way, as their paths across the lake converge.

They get back to Bosky Rounds, and Claire quietly says they have to leave. Reversa was here again.  No doubt what side of the street she’s on (or that she believes there is a street).  She gave Mrs. Barlett wanted posters to put up there. If people can compare the police sketch with Parker, sitting there having breakfast, somebody will make the connection.

Parker tells Claire she can’t check out yet.  Leave tomorrow, so it doesn’t seem like she’s running.  He’s going to hide out at the church, with the money.  Sandra drives him there.  For all their mutual understanding, there’s still plenty of distrust (which is what you expect from two carnivores who pair up to take down something too big for a lone wolf).

She gives him a mover’s pad, to serve as a blanket.  It’s going to be cold in that church.  She’s got some bottled water as well.  He’s going to be hungry, but he’s used to that.  He checks everything out after she drops him off.  Nothing changed.  Just have to wait for McWhitney to come with the truck.

It was a long empty day.  For part of it he walked, indoors or out, and other parts he sat against a wall in the empty house or curled into the moving pad again and slept.  He woke from one of those with the long diagonals of late afternoon light coming in the window and Nick Dalesia seated cross-legged on the floor against the opposite wall.  The revolver in his right hand, not exactly pointing anywhere, would belong to the dead marshal.

Parker sat up.  “So there you are,” he said.

Somehow, even when you’ve got a gun on Parker and he’s barehanded, it always feels like you’re the one in danger.  Dalesia’s got the drop on him, and he should drop him.  But he needs a car.  Does Parker have one parked nearby?  (Damn, again seeing why Westlake sometimes regretted choosing that name.)

They’re five feet apart.  Parker has to play this just right.  Stay calm, wait for the opening.  Nick keeps asking questions, trying to figure out what Parker is doing here.  Then he knows–Parker is waiting–for back-up–and to kill him.  He hesitates.  Just for a moment.  They’re friends, aren’t they?  Oh Nick.  You know better.  The job is over.  You killed a cop.  You want all the money now.  The rules have changed.  For all we know, this is what happened to Handy McKay.

Parker tosses the water bottle towards Nick, and just for a moment it catches his eye.  A moment is all Parker needs.  He throws the makeshift blanket, and makes his move.  A bullet pierces the mat.  End of Part One.  I’ll do Parts Two and Three next time.  Then Part Four.  And then we’re done with Stark.

I don’t know if the frozen lake thing is a coincidence.  Los Lobos came out with that song back in 1984.  It was pretty popular.  Westlake could have heard it. And very different minds sometimes run along parallel lines.  If you believe in lines. Do you believe the wolf will survive?

I need to.

(Part of Friday’s Forgotten Books)

Mr. Stark and The Triptych

When I sent Ask The Parrot, the previous Parker novel in the series, to Stephen Moore, my west coast agent, he said, “Oh, does that mean it’s going to be a trilogy?” “No, no,” I said, “This is just the next book in the series.” But his question stuck in my mind. Although Ask The Parrot had nothing to do with the book before that, Nobody Runs Forever, except that it starts one second after the previous book ends, and although Ask The Parrot does close out its own story and characters pretty satisfactorily, it was true there were some messy strings hanging out of Nobody Runs Forever and some cash up there in New England that Parker and his associates thought they had a right to. So, thanks to Stephen Moore, Dirty Money started to grow in my mind. Maybe it’s more a triptych than a trilogy, where the side panels reflect on one story and the center panel reflects on something else. At any rate, it closes out the triplet, tercet, triangle, and the job is done. And no, it won’t be a tetralogy.

Donald E. Westlake, blogging about himself.

“For me this painting is a kind of rosary, or a ring of colourless figures, who can glow when there is real contact and who tell me truths that I cannot express with words and did not know before. It can only speak to people who, consciously or not, have within them more or less the same metaphysical code.”

Max Beckmann, referring to his 1932 triptych, Departure. 

It’s been about three and a half years since I reviewed The Hunter (with a Starkian brevity I can only glance back upon in wonder now–and I thought I was being so bold and undisciplined, making that review a two-parter).

And here I sit, twenty four reviews later (counting the Grofields), prepared to look at the last three Richard Stark novels we’ll ever have.

Not the best of them, by any means.  Not the worst either (that’s still Flashfire).   But having subjected the saga to such intense scrutiny over that much time, I feel entitled to say that I don’t know of a more riveting, intriguing, or satisfying multi-book journey in all of literature, nor one that closes itself out with such integrity, if not finality.  And if we’re talking about a series based around one character that proceeded over the course of a score or more novels and close to five decades–well, I can’t say I’ve encountered its equal.

The runner up for me would be the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian (I know, two characters, but I think of them as one), which I devoured back in the 90’s.  And they were still coming out at the time, so I kept reading, and came to wish I hadn’t.  After The Commodore, the story was complete, even if Bonaparte was still at large.  The Yellow Admiral was a pleasant enough coda to the dance.  Then the masts toppled.  Would I had not read a word of the remaining two and a half books.  An unpleasant surprise (still better than the movie with Russell Crowe).  O’Brian was having his troubles towards the end, but who isn’t?

Series fiction is harder than most people think.  And more important than most critics will allow.  Oh, they’ll acknowledge there are ‘serious’ writers who have dabbled in it. (Dabbled?  More than half John Updike’s novels are series fiction.)  But there is always the suspicion that by writing one book after another about the same set of well-liked creations, a writer is merely playing to the pit, repeating him or herself, to ever-diminishing effect.

And that’s usually the case, if not right away, then eventually.  Did we need most of the latter run of Sherlock Holmes stories?  Conan Doyle clearly didn’t think so.  (I sometimes think he was getting revenge on the public for rejecting his knightly romances about Sir Nigel and the Hundred Years War.)

Any idea, any character, can be exhausted through repetition for repetition’s sake.  Even Wodehouse, perhaps the ultimate master of series fiction, was flagging at the end.  As was Westlake, just a bit, in his last few Dortmunder novels, which have much of Wodehouse in them.

Stark never did.  Past his prime, perhaps.  His potency?  Not hardly.  Some people say he got a bit softer.  I say he got even starker.   This Triptych begins with Parker strangling a man with a necktie, at a card game.  Towards the end, he strangles another man with one hand.  But that’s not really what I mean by starker.

There was always a certain romantic element to the series, from the start. Westlake said himself that Stark was a romantic. By which he meant an idealist; Parker representing that perfect Platonic form, that everything else in creation is aspiring to, and never quite attaining.  He’s real, but he’s not real.  He’s a man on the outside, but he’s the furthest possible thing from a man.  He’s a wolf on the inside, but you can’t be a true wolf without others of your kind around you, and he’s alone.  He’s evil, he’s honorable, he’s beyond category.  An insoluble mystery, which is why he belongs in this genre.

And in the earlier run of novels, written mostly for the crime paperback market, Stark indulged our desire for larger than life adventure.  Parker goes to war with organized crime.  Parker steals a forgotten art treasure.  Parker loots an entire town.  Parker sacks an island casino run by a German aristocrat who used to be a Nazi.  Parker steals rare coins and finds an even rarer woman into the bargain. Parker steals the payroll from a military base.  Parker steals the box office for a rock concert, and then defends it from a pair of drug-crazed longhairs.  Parker fights an army of mobsters in an amusement park, then comes back later to decimate that mob, decapitate it.

Well, there’s none of that here.  He robs a tiny rural bank and a minor upstate racetrack.  Positively mundane.

And there were the vendettas–the most impractical thing about him, therefore the most romantic.  His need to finish things with those who violated his sense of order, who transgressed against unwritten laws.  Well, there’s none of that here either.  No Mal Resnicks, no George Uhls, no treacherous gang lords (well there’s one, but if he’s plotting a cross, it’s coming later, and there was no later).

There are people he needs to kill, and he does, but it never has that personal feeling to it.  It all makes sense, from his standpoint.  He’s calmed down a lot since the first book.  I guess you could say calmer means softer.  Parker never would.  To him, a well-ordered mind is the deadliest weapon you can wield.

So while I think most of the best writing in the series had already been done years before, in spite of my undying love for the grand gory guns-a-blazing scenarios that have played out in past decades, I can still appreciate what’s being done here–how everything is scaled back, made more real, less fanciful, so that you could almost drive through Northern Massachusetts, or upstate New York, and imagine you see him, at a gas station, or a crossroads.  It’s all taking place at the northeastern tip of America.  Westlake country.  The Stark Lands.

Westlake began this process with Comeback, but there was still much of the old romance there.  There’s none by the end.  Because really, what room is there for romance in this world we live in now?  Because old men see the world differently than young men.  And Westlake is old now.  So is Stark.  But he’s aging better, because what he has to do is simpler.

Westlake was the more sophisticated writer (so there were more things that could go wrong).  The farceur, the satirist, the social commentator.  Indignant and irreverent at the same time.  Dry, whimsical, witty, compassionate, urbane. Stark just had to be dry.  Until things got wet.

The saga had begun without any plan for it to be one.  The Hunter was supposed to be a one shot, that ended with the random death of its random anti-hero protagonist.  And just as randomly, Bucklin Moon, who I will always believe saw in Parker’s story some funhouse mirror image of his own, demanded a rewrite. Parker would live. Parker would win.  Parker would go on being Parker.  (And Moon ended up retiring to the Florida Keys, where Parker was thinking about going at the end of the book.)

So Westlake followed up with a book that followed right on the heels of the previous one, but somehow skirted away from that storyline.  Parker is hiding behind a new face, planning an unrelated job, and it goes off pretty well, with a few complications, but the way it ends, he’s realizing he’s going to have to confront unfinished business from the earlier book.  So that’s what he does in the third book.

And whether Westlake knew it or not, that was the first Starkian Triptych.  And it just went on from there, until there were twenty-eight novels, about Parker and his thespian sideman, Grofield.  Three more than he wrote about Dortmunder, Tobin, Holt, and Joslyn, combined.  Not that numbers tell the whole story, by any means.

Westlake probably never got over this quirk of fate, that gave him his second (and more lucrative) steady contract with a publisher, got him out of having to write crap he didn’t believe in.  Now he was writing crap he did believe in–makes a difference.

Now having strong relationships with two first-rate editors, Lee Wright at Random House and Moon at Pocket, he could perfect his craft,  really figure out what this writing gig was about, while supporting his family.  Breathing space. Parker got him out of a tight spot, and he never forgot it.  He’d sell the novels to Hollywood (or Paris), but never the character.  Parker would remain Parker, and his cinematic counterparts, well or poorly executed by committee, would be something else, something less.

He had his little ambiguities about the devil he was dealing with.  Mr. Westlake had a criminal mind, but not the heart to go with it.  He wasn’t sure this was what he was supposed to be writing, and I doubt any writer worth reading is ever sure about that.  He abandoned the Stark voice, then learned it had abandoned him.  It only came back to him once he’d reached a certain age, and Parker no longer represented the romantic in him, but the realist.  Which, at a certain age, means the same thing as fatalist.

And this sense of fatalism permeates the second unplanned Triptych, beginning with the title of the first panel, which had an ending so stark as to make readers who’d been there from the beginning ask if the man with the getaway face had made his last getaway.

He hadn’t, but that brings us to the second and major panel, which takes Parker out of the underworld he normally inhabits, into our world–and guess what?  It’s not that different.  He just sits there most of the time, watching us go through our paces, fine civilized people that we are.  And wonders what the fuss is all about.  Some people didn’t get it.  Thought it was too quiet, too uneventful, too rustic.  Some people never do get the point of anything. You know what Max Beckmann would say about that?

At some point, he must have realized he was unconsciously echoing the first Triptych (the word, incidentally, occurred quite independently to me, before I ever read that quote I put up top).  It was time to get back to the themes of the first panel, finish that story.  But to leave some things unfinished, in case he had a little more room to run afterwards.  As matters worked out, he didn’t.  Mexico beckoned in the distance.  Oh well.  You know what they say.

Autumn is here.  Winter is coming.  I had to get that in there somehow.