Parker16 Butcher's Moon (3 page)

The Marooned! ride was accomplished in fake rubber rafts made of gray plastic, each holding eight passengers. The raft was pulled on a concealed chain through a shallow waterway that snaked through the dark interior of the building past the lit-up displays. There was a series of the oldest and best-known desert-island jokes; a triggering mechanism in the bottom of the raft caused the displays to light up on either side, with mechanized dolls making small movements in conjunction with the recorded gag lines. Between the displays, in the darkness, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling as though to collide with the raft, but always swung back up out of the way again, just in time, usually with a great gnashing noise of ratchets and gears.

All through the ride Grofield had sat brooding over the contrast between the business this tacky thrillorama was doing and the near-emptiness of his own serious theater back in Indiana. Civilization was in a decline right enough, there wasn't any question of that.

It was the last tableau that Parker had told him to take a special interest in. It was bigger than any of the others; almost life-size, it showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. On first coming around the corner in the raft, one saw another mechanical doll, a male castaway dressed in tattered rags, who was bobbing his head in joy over a chest of gold he'd just accidentally dug up. On floating past him and around to the far side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, one saw a longboat full of pirates that had just landed; armed with picks and shovels, they were obviously here to reclaim their gold.

So were Grofield and Parker. Grofield had studied the desert island and the longboat and all the figures as the raft had slid by, and then had gone on to entertain himself in other sections of the park, and now was back to Marooned! again, drifting along, taking his time. All around, the noise and lights both were fading as the park prepared itself to close for the night. The crowd, which up to now had ebbed and flowed in all directions at once, now tended in two specific currents, one toward the fountain at the center of the park and the other toward the exit, down between the Desert Island and Island Earth.

The rear of the Marooned! building was away from any regular path, a black patch amid the brightness. Grofield turned down that way, walking along next to the featureless green-gray side of the building, and back here he became more aware of the quality of the night itself. The light and noise and movement elsewhere created an artificial daytime, but off in this corner the darkness pressed in, close and pervasive. Grofield looked up at a cloudless sky full of cold tiny stars and a thin crescent of moon, too narrow to give much light. The air was warm, but the sky looked cold and thin and very dark.

Parker was already waiting, by the back door. He was merely a darker shape in the general darkness, and Grofield took his identity on faith, whispering, "How we doing?"

"I've got it open. Come on."

They stepped through into total blackness, and Grofield pulled the door closed behind him without letting it latch. They were now in a narrow corridor formed on one side by the outer shell of the building and on the other by a continuous black drape. From beyond the drape came the echoing noises of the desert-island displays, the recorded gag lines and music and sound effects.

"I deplore this place," Grofield whispered.

Parker didn't answer, but Grofield hadn't really expected him to. They moved away from the door together, traveling to the right between drapery and wall, Parker leading the way and Grofield following, guided by the faint rustling sounds of Parker's sleeve against the drape.

Parker stopped, and Grofield bumped into him. They stood In silence, listening to the tinny recordings. Then Grofield sensed Parker moving again, and a vertical strip of reddish light appeared just to his right; Parker had opened a separation in the drapery, and they could look through to the main floor of the Marooned! ride. .

They were just behind that final island tableau, with its lone castaway on the one side and the longboat full of pirates on the other. Looking through the narrow slit in the drapes, reminding himself of himself checking the house before a performance back home in Mead Grove, Grofield could see past the island to K raft full of customers going by. Goggle-eyed and gape- mouthed, the people in the raft looked unhuman and feebleminded in the red and yellow lights, being drawn along through the darkness as though they too were part of the display. They looked no less waxy and unreal than the pirates in and around the longboat.

The longboat. That was where Parker had left the money, in a suitcase stuffed down in the bottom, with one of the pirate mannequins placed on top of it. And seventy-three thousand dollars from the armored car inside it.

Another raft went by, with its red-faced humanoids. Hard to believe they were actual people, they reminded him so much of the moving targets at the shooting gallery.
Pock pock pock
he went, in his mind, and imagined the heads popping back on hinges, while the torsos remained upright and unmoving. In a little while the same raft would go by again with the same figures in it, their heads back in place.

A space; no raft coming. The island lighting switched off, and they stood in almost total darkness. Music, speeches, sound effects echoing all around them, muffled slightly by the draperies. Bits of isolated light here and there in the black building interior, like Indian campfires on a distant range of hills.

The island lighting snapped back on, triggered by another approaching raft. It went by, and the lights went off. The music and sound effects sounded thinner than before; there were fewer campfires.

Twice more the island appeared in its banks of red and yellow lights, and after the second time there were no more campfires at all, and only one thin wheedle of music. Then that too died, and a more anonymous general sound could be heard; the crowd, outside this building, shuffling away.

"All right," Parker said.

Grofield already had the pencil flashlight in his hand, and now he switched it on. He held it along his palm so that he could adjust how much light he would permit to escape between his first and second fingers: ranging from all the light to none. He laid down a vague ribbon of white aimed toward the longboat, and Parker walked along it, his feet making muffled echoing noises against the platform with its fake sand.

Grofield followed close behind, keeping the light aimed ahead of the two of them. His ears were alert for other human occupancy of the building, but he heard nothing. He remained a pace back when they reached the longboat, aiming the light into the interior of the boat while he looked all around in the darkness for other lights to appear.

Parker shoved a mannequin out of the way and reached into the boat. He pushed a second mannequin, felt around, and said, "Give me more light."

Grofield stepped closer to the boat, aiming the light directly into it, spreading his fingers more so that the full beam shone out. There was no suitcase in the bottom of the boat.

"All right," Parker said. He turned away, walking back toward the exit, and Grofield followed him.
I knew it wouldn't be that easy
, Grofield thought, but he didn't say anything.

Outside, they walked along with the last stragglers toward the park exit. Grofield said, "What now?"

"When I was in here," Parker said, "some local tough boys knew I was here. They tried to find me, to get the money."

"So they must have searched after you got away."

"Right."

"Do you know how to find any of them?"

"I know the name of their boss," Parker said. "Lozini."

Five

Adolf Lozini, at the electric wok, said, "The trouble with a lot of people is, they don't understand about Chinese cooking."

The three men standing around the patio gave respectful nods. Their wives were sitting over in the pool area with Mr. Lozini's wife, talking about racially integrated high schools. The underwater lights were on, making rippling light streaks all around that part of the yard, and the wives in their pink and blue taffeta looked like dowdy mermaids past their prime.

"The Chinese," Lozini said, "
respect
their food, that's the whole secret. Like it was a person." He poked at the water chestnuts and celery pieces with a fork, and the three men all nodded once more.

The three were executives. The one in the bright blue suit and dark green ascot was Frankie Faran, a sometime union officer and also currently manager of the New York Room, a club downtown with live entertainment: two strippers all week, plus a jazz group on weekends. The one sweating in the white turtleneck was Jack Walters, an attorney and an officer in several holding companies. And the one in the black bow tie and bright madras jacket was a former accountant, Nathan Simms by name, who now ran the local policy game and also took care of a number of personal financial matters for Mr. Lozini.

Although the house in the background was very Northeastern in style, with its steep roof and small double-hung windows and dark shingle siding, the large yard at the rear was completely Southern California, the result of several business trips Lozini had made to Los Angeles a few years ago. Green and amber floodlights glowed on the plane trees and maple trees and the rear wall of the house. The patio was pink slate, the pool was blue and kidney-shaped, the tennis court ran north-south. Stockade fencing enclosed the area, but the ivy that was supposed to have spread over the fencing had mostly died, leaving only straggling remnants climbing upward here and there, like leafy cracks in a rooming-house wall.

The weather was warm tonight, more suitable to the California yard than the New England house. The watery smell of cooking vegetables hung in the air, mixed with the chatter of the women over by the pool. Lozini smiled at his handiwork, then smiled around in a general way at his guests, and they obediently smiled right back.

Lozini considered himself a gourmet cook, and there was no one in his circle to contradict him, either through greater knowledge or greater power. Pleased with his own cooking, and pleased as well with the status of power he had finally reached after many years of struggle, Lozini three or four times each week invited guests from among his subordinates and fed them dishes from Italy or Spain or France or China or almost anywhere; he was a gourmet with catholic tastes. It was considered an honor to be invited to a Lozini dinner, and a disaster to go too long
without
being invited. No one ever refused.

The vegetables were cooking; too slowly, but Lozini didn't know that. He smiled paternally at them, stirred them a bit more, and looked up as Harold approached from the house. Harold's white serving jacket was tailored so carefully that no gun was evident at all; Lozini's wife didn't like the look of guns, especially in the house.

Lozini waited, the wooden spoon in his hand, and his three guests stepped discreetly backward out of the way. Theirs was a world in which it was better not to overhear other people's conversations.

Harold arrived. Leaning over the wok, his face in the upward current of thin steam, he said quietly, "Somebody on the phone for you, Mr. Lozini."

"Who?" . . . .

"I don't know, Mr. Lozini. He won't give a name."

Lozini frowned. "Why should I talk to him? What does he want?"

"He said it's about the guy in the amusement park, Mr. Lozini."

Lozini squinted as though it were his own face in the steam, not Harold's. "What guy in the—" But then he remembered.

"I don't know, Mr. Lozini," Harold said. He wouldn't know anything about that, of course. "He just said I should tell you—"

"All right, all right," Lozini said. He nodded briskly to shut Harold up, and stood squinting toward the house. The heist artist in the amusement park, hiding in there with the loot from an armored-car robbery. Lozini had sent some people in to get him, and they'd failed. That was a couple years ago—and who would want to talk to him about it now, on the phone?

Harold waited patiently, his face in the steam. The three guests were in a low meaningless conversation to one side. Lozini came to a decision. "All right," he said, and turned toward the three men. "Nate?"

Simms, the former accountant, came over with his eyebrows politely raised. "Anything I can do?"

Lozini handed him the wooden spoon. "Stir this," he said. "Don't let it burn." To Harold he said, "I'll take it in the cabana."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini."

Harold went back to the house, and Lozini marched over to the cabanas, a row of three dressing rooms, each with its own cot and toilet and sink. The one at the end also held a telephone; Lozini went in there, switched on the light, closed the door, sat on the bed, and picked up the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Lozini?" The voice was somewhat harsh, but neutral.

"Speaking," Lozini said, and heard the click as Harold hung up the kitchen extension.

"Last time you saw me," the voice said, "you thought I was a cop named O'Hara. You thought I hurt my head."

Lozini got it right away; it was the heistman himself, the one he'd helped hunt down in the amusement park. The bastard had gotten out dressed like a cop, palming himself off as one of Lozini's tame cops. "You son of a bitch," Lozini said, squeezing the phone, leaning forward over his knees. He wanted to say that three good men had been killed that time, and that the heister still had to pay for it, but he held himself in check; things like that weren't said on the phone. "I want to see you again," Lozini said. He was breathing hard, as though he'd run up a flight of stairs.