The Handle Read online

  The Handle

  RICHARD STARK

  With a New Foreword by Luc Sante

  The University of Chicago Press

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  © 1966 by Richard Stark

  Foreword © 2009 by Luc Sante

  All rights reserved.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77106-9 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77106-7 (paper)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933-2008.

  The handle / Richard Stark ; with a new foreword by Luc Sante.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77106-9 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77106-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Parker (Fictitious character) 2. Criminals—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.E9H3 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2009012977

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  eISBN: 9780226772837

  Contents

  Foreword

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Foreword

  THE PARKER novels by Richard Stark are a singularly long-lasting literary franchise, established in 1962 and pursued to the present, albeit with a twenty-three-year hiatus in the middle. In other ways, too, they are a unique proposition. When I read my first Parker novel—picked up at random, and in French translation, no less—I was a teenager, and hadn't read much crime fiction beyond Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. I was stunned by the book, by its power and economy and the fact that it blithely dispensed with moral judgment, and of course I wanted more. Not only did I want more Parker and more Stark, I also imagined that I had stumbled upon a particularly brilliant specimen of a thriving genre. But I was wrong. There is no such genre.

  To be sure, there are plenty of tight, harsh crime novels, beginning with Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, and there is a substantial body of books written from the point of view of the criminal, ranging from the tortured cries of Jim Thompson and David Goodis to the mordantly analytical romans durs by Georges Simenon. There are quite a few caper novels, including the comic misadventures Parker's creator writes under his real name, Donald Westlake, and the works of a whole troop of French writers not well known in this country: Jose Giovanni, Albert Simonin, San-Antonio. The lean, efficient Giovanni in particular has points in common with Stark (Anglophonescan best approach him through movie adaptations: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le deuxième souffle, Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques), but with the key difference that Giovanni is an unabashed romantic.

  Stark is not a romantic, or at least not within the first six feet down from the surface. Westlake has said that he meant the books to be about “a workman at work,” which they are, and that is why they have so few useful parallels, why they are virtually a genre unto themselves. Process and mechanics and troubleshooting dominate the books, determine their plots, underlie their aesthetics and their moral structure. A great many of the editions down through the years have prominently featured a blurb from Anthony Boucher: “Nobody tops Stark in his objective portrayal of a world of total amorality.” That is true as far as it goes—it is never suggested in the novels that robbing payrolls or shooting people who present liabilities are anything more than business practices—but Boucher overlooked the fact that Parker maintains his own very lively set of moral prerogatives. Parker abhors waste, sloth, frivolity, inconstancy, double-dealing, and reckless endangerment as much as any Puritan. He hates dishonesty with a passion, although you and he may differ on its terms. He is a craftsman who takes pride in his work.

  Parker is in fact a bit like the ideal author of a crime-fiction series: solid, dependable, attentive to every nuance and detail. He is annoyed by small talk and gets straight to the point in every instance, using no more than the necessary number of words to achieve his aim. He eschews shortcuts, although he can make difficult processes look easy, and he is free of any trace of sentiment, although he knows that while planning and method and structure are crucial, character is even more important. As brilliant as he is as a strategist, he is nothing short of phenomenal at instantly grasping character. This means that he sometimes sounds more like a fictional detective than a crook, but mostly he sounds like a writer. In order to decide which path the double-crosser he is pursuing is most likely to have taken, or which member of the string is most likely to double-cross, or the odds on a reasonable-sounding job that has just been proposed to him by someone with shaky credentials, he has to get all the way under the skin of the party in question. He is an exceptionally intelligent freelancer in a risky profession who takes on difficult jobs hoping for a payoff large enough to hold off the next job for as long as possible. He even has an agent (Joe Sheer succeeded by Handy McKay). Then again he is seen—by other characters as well as readers—as lacking in emotion, let alone sympathy, a thug whose sole motivation is self-interest.

  And no wonder: Parker is a big, tough man with cold eyes. “His hands looked like they'd been molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins”; the sentence appears like a Homeric epithet somewhere in an early chapter of most of the books. He might just possibly pass for a businessman, provided the business is something like used cars or jukeboxes. He doesn't drink much, doesn't gamble, doesn't read, likes to sit in the dark, thinking, or else in front of the television, not watching but employing it as an aid to concentration. Crude and antisocial at the start of the series, he actually evolves considerably over its course. Claire, whom he meets in The Rare Coin Score, seems to have a lot to do with this—by Deadly Edge they actually have a house together. And Alan Grofield, first encountered in The Score and recurring in The Handle, among other titles, twice in the series becomes the recipient of what can only be called acts of kindness from Parker, however much Stark equivocates on this point, insisting that they merely reflect professional ethics or some such.

  Parker is a sort of supercriminal—not at all like those European master criminals, such as Fantomas and Dr. Mabuse, but a very American freebooter, able to outmaneuver the Mob, the CIA, and whatever other forces come at him. For all that he lives on the other side of the law, he bears a certain resemblance to popular avengers of the 1960s and ‘70s, Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson's character in Death Wish. He is a bit of a fanatic, and even though we are repeatedly told how sybaritic his off duty resort-hotel lifestyle is, it remains hard to picture, since he is such an ascetic in the course of the stories. He is so utterly consumed by the requirements of his profession that everything extraneous to it is suppressed when he's on, and we are not privy to his time off, except for narrow vignettes in which he is glimpsed having sex or, once, swimming. But then, writers are writing even when they're not writing, aren't they?

  After The Hunter, all the remaining titles concern jobs gone wrong, which seems to be the case for most of Parker's jobs, barring the occasional fleeting allusion to smoother operations in the past. The Seve
nth is, naturally, the seventh book in the series, as well as a reference to the split from the take in a stadium job. The actual operation is successful; the problem is what occurs afterward. It represents the very rare incursion, for the Parker series, of a thriller staple: the crazed gunman. Along with The Rare Coin Score, it is one of Stark's always very-pointed explorations of group dynamics. The Handle, with its private gambling island, ex-Nazi villain, and international intrigue, is (like The Mourner and The Black Ice Score) a nod to the espionage craze of the 1960s, when authors of thrillers could not afford to ignore James Bond. If The Seventh is primarily aftermath, The Handle is largely preamble. In The Rare Coin Score (the first of four such titles, succeeded by Green Eagle, Black Ice, and Sour Lemon) the culprit is an amateur, a coin dealer whose arrested development is so convincingly depicted the reader can virtually hear his voice squeak. Sharp characterizations abound in this one—its plot turns entirely on character flaws of various sizes.

  The Parker books are all engines, machines that start up with varying levels of difficulty, then run through a process until they are done, although subject to different sorts of interference. The heists depicted are only part of this process—sometimes they are even peripheral to it. Parker is the mechanic who runs the machine and attempts to keep it oiled and on course. The interference is always caused by personalities—by the greed, incompetence, treachery, duplicity, or insanity of individuals concerned, although this plays out in a variety of ways, depending on whether it affects the job at beginning, middle, or end, and whether it occurs as a single dramatic action, a domino sequence of contingencies, or a gradually fraying rope. The beauty of the machine is that not only does it allow for the usual suspense, but it also maximizes the effectiveness of its opposite: the satisfaction of inevitability. Some Parker novels are fantastically intricate clockwork mechanisms (The Hunter, The Outfit, the seemingly unstoppable Slayground, the epic Butcher's Moon), while others hurtle along as successions of breakdowns (the aptly acidic The Sour Lemon Score, the almost sadistically frustrating Plunder Squad). Like all machines but unlike lesser thrillers the novels have numerous moving parts, and the more the better—more people, more subplots, more businesslike detail, more glimpses of marginal lives. Stark's momentum is such that the more matter he throws into the hopper the faster the gears turn. The books are machines that all but read themselves. You can read the entire series and not once have to invest in a bookmark.

  Luc Sante

  December 2008

  ONE

  1

  When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around. The mainland was nearly out of sight now, just a gray smudge on the horizon between the dark blue of the water and the lighter blue of the sky.

  The man who called himself Yancy was sitting in one of the two chairs astern, and the man whose name Parker didn't know was standing at the controls. They both wore white trousers, navy blue jackets and yachting caps and sunglasses, but they both had the faces and voices and hands of New York or Chicago hoods.

  Yancy raised the hand with the glass in it and motioned forward. “There it is,” he said.

  Parker turned and looked out past the spray-flecked windshield, over the top of the rest of the boat, and out over the water to the island. It was still about half a mile away, and all he could make out was a mound of jungle greenery bulging up out of the water over there.

  “Get in closer,” he said. “I can't see anything from here.”

  The one at the wheel said, “We don't want to take chances.”

  Yancy said, “He's right. Move in closer.”

  The guy at the wheel didn't like it, but he had nothing more to say. He just frowned behind his sunglasses, shrugged his shoulders, and started the engine.

  Yancy waved the hand with the bottle in it. “Come on and sit down. Why stay below all the time?”

  Parker had gone down into the cabin before they'd left the dock and had stayed there until just now. He had no fear of water, but he didn't like boats and he didn't like the ocean. Coming out away from land like this was like sticking yourself in a cage; there was no way out. From a practical point of view he was stuck on this boat, imprisoned on it, till it touched land again. So long as he stayed down below in the cabin, a place that looked like half the motel rooms in the southwest, he wasn't so aware of the caged feeling, but up here, surrounded by the flat blue water of the Gulf of Mexico, he was reminded of it all the time.

  Still, the island was in sight, and that's what he'd come out here to see, so he went back and sat in the other white chair next to Yancy. The boat was pushing through the waves again, not very fast, heading toward the island.

  Parker supposed it was a good boat, as boats go. It was an Owens cabin cruiser, forty feet long, sleek and gleaming, mostly white, with a blond wood deck. There were three rooms below, plus two baths, and space enough with convertible sofa and hideaway bed to sleep eight. The area up here where he and Yancy were sitting could probably be easily fixed up with fastened seats for deep-sea fishing.

  Yancy said, “The main building's around the other side of the island.”

  “What's on this side?”

  “Storage sheds, power plant, few guest cottages.”

  “Guest cottages? Customers stay over?” He hadn't been told that.

  Yancy shrugged. “Sometimes. Just one night, you know what I mean?”

  Parker said, “It's a whorehouse, too, is that it?”

  “Not very much.” Yancy grinned and spread his hands. “Just sometimes, on a special request, for some good friend of Baron's.”

  Parker said, “You know Baron?”

  Smiling, Yancy shook his head. “I know about Baron. That's what counts.” He was better than his partner at the wheel in making his speech suit his playboy clothing; only the hard lines of his face gave the lie away.

  Parker had been with Yancy off and on the last two days and at all times Yancy carried a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. Now, discovering the current bottle was empty, he got to his feet and said, “Blast.” He flipped the bottle over the side. “Be right back.”

  Parker watched him go. Yancy moved as though the boat were on dry land and he himself was sober. He went down the ladder into the cabin below and out of sight. Parker watched the island coming closer; he could make out buildings in among the greenery now, small pink cottages near the water and some sort of brick construction farther back.

  As Yancy was coming back up on deck with a fresh bottle, the guy at the wheel said, “Somebody coming.”

  Parker got to his feet. A small boat was chopping through the water toward them, leaving a white Y in its wake.

  Yancy said, “No problem, no problem.” As though he wanted to soothe his partner at the wheel.

  Parker knew the other two looked all right out here, but he in his suit wouldn't ring true. He said, “I'll wait down below.”

  “Fine, fine.” Yancy, distracted, waved the hand with the glass in it. He was watching the little boat speeding toward them.

  Parker went below. He was in a fair-sized but crowded room, furnished with a sectional sofa, a chair and table, and a combination kitchenette-bar. Curtained windows lined both sides, giving the interior a dim and bluish light.

  Parker went into the aft cabin, more crowded and with a lower ceiling. In one of the closets he found a white yachting cap and a blue jacket like those worn by the two men up on deck. He stripped off his suitcoat and tie, opened his shirt collar, and put on the cap and jacket. Then he went back up on deck.

  The smaller boat was just pulling alongside. Three men were in it, all young and hard-looking, wearing dungarees and T-shirts. One of them called, “You people lost?”

  Yancy, smiling, holding his bottle and glass, called back, “Not us. Just out for a spin around the park.”

  The trio in the other boat couldn't be close enough to see the truth on Yancy's face, so they'd have to think they were just looking at an amiable clown. The one that talked said, “Y
ou don't want to get too close to the island. Dangerous rocks, things like that. You could ruin your boat.”

  “Thanks so much.” Yancy gestured with bottle and glass. “We'll just sweep around it and hurry on home. Thanks for your concern.”

  “Remember. Don't get too close.”

  “I'll remember.”

  The little boat veered off, heading back for the island. Yancy turned and said, “Very nice. The jacket's a little small, but the cap looks quite sporty.”

  Parker said, “How many of those has Baron got?”

  “What? Boats?”

  “Torpedoes.”

  “Oh.” Yancy brushed them aside with an airy wave of the bottle. “Half a dozen, maybe ten. Beach bums.”

  Parker took the cap and jacket off, dropped them on the chair next to the guy at the wheel. “So far,” he said, “it don't look good.”

  “Love will find a way,” Yancy said.

  Parker looked at him. Sometimes it seemed as though the face was a lie and the rest was the truth. Yancy was somebody you could underestimate.

  The guy at the wheel said, “They still hangin’ around, in by shore.”

  Parker told him, “Go around the island to the left.” To Yancy he said, “The brick building there, up behind the cottages. What's that?”

  Yancy squinted, behind his sunglasses. “Power plant,” he said. “Storage sheds the other side of it, on the far slope. You'll be able to see it better as we go around.”