The Big Caper | Page 7

over and kissed her lightly.
"I still wish you didn't have to see him," he said.
They stood up then and started back toward the house. They held hands as they walked.
"I'm going up and see Kosta," Frank said as they reached the porch. "Drunk or sober, he's got to get up. I want him out and around the town this afternoon. I want him to go over the maps."
"I've got to get those damned dishes done," Kay said.
"Alice is bringing the kids over this afternoon and I promised I'd go to the beach with them."
She pulled him to her suddenly and her arms went around his waist and she lifted her mouth to his kiss.
"Don't ever worry about Flood again," she said.
Chapter Two

1.
Nothing suited him. The warm, indolent climate, the second-floor room in the tourist home that he had rented for a week, the restaurant two blocks away where he had his meals--he hated them all, the same as he had hated the long ride down on the train.
He was an old man, well past seventy, and he was set in his ways. Never married, with any memory of family long faded, with neither friends nor companions, he was a man who had always lived alone and who had become intolerant of change. No human being in the world meant anything to him, and the few persons with whom he was forced to deal in the course of his solitary life he accepted only grudgingly.
The ones whom he would be working with on this job he neither knew nor wanted to know. He had no curiosity about them, no interest in them.
Flood had hired him and Flood was the only one who meant anything at all to him. Flood meant fifteen thousand dollars in cash--the money he was being paid to do what he had to do.
There were only a very few like him left and he knew it. He knew his value. That was one reason he had been able to drive the bargain with Flood when he had been approached. That's why he had told Flood to take his percentage and shove it; that his price was fifteen thousand, paid in advance.
And he had had his way. Flood had been forced to agree.
For Flood he held a certain degree of respect, if not liking. Flood was an expert in his field. Not a specialist, but at least an expert.
This old man with his faded blue eyes, his veined, gnarled hands, his sunken chest, and his gaunt, stooped frame was a specialist. He knew his business backward and forward. He'd started out in Bavaria as an apprentice in a toolmaking shop and he'd been several years learning his trade. What he had learned he'd learned well, and it had always stayed with him.
When he had first come to the United States he had worked in a shipyard, and then later he had worked for a safe and vault firm. That's where he had obtained the second part of his education.
Years later, long after he had finished his first stretch in the penitentiary, he had taken up explosives, and he had mastered the delicate technique of handling them with the same thoroughness that characterized his mastery " of his other crafts.
He never forgot anything and he never lost the amazing dexterity that had made him an artist in his field. Not even the last long stretch, the fifteen years in the federal penitentiary, had made him lose it.
He was one of the very last of an old school. In his entire career he had never carried a gun or found the necessity for using one. He didn't understand or approve of the current crop of burglars and hoodlums. He was a criminal and that he freely admitted, but he belonged to a different generation and a different time, an era that no longer existed.
And now he was an old, old man and this would probably be his last job. With what he already had saved and safely invested in government securities, the fifteen thousand dollars would see him through until he died.
When it was over he'd just get on the train and go back up North to the little town where he owned the tiny bungalow, and he'd sit on his porch in the sun and know that he was all through and that there was nothing else left to do but wait for death. No worries, no fear of ending up in the poorhouse.
He had a tremendous pride and he'd always had it. He wanted to be dependent on no mail.
His needs were simple: a roof over his head, plenty of the kind of food that he liked to cook for himself, a glass of schnapps now and then for his stomach's sake. And the music.
He'd go down to New