The Specialists by Lawrence Block Page A

think she did. I stopped on the way and put the stuff in the fridge earlier.” He took a spoonful and smiled apologetically. “A sweet tooth,” he said.
    “It’s a wonder you don’t put on weight.”
    “I don’t eat that heavily, sir. And of course I stay active. But late at night I get a yen for something sweet, about the way most people want a nightcap.”
    The colonel shook his head slowly. “Now, I’m sure I haven’t eaten anything like that in thirty years.”
    “Want one? I’ll fix you one.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so, Frank.”
    “I’m an expert, sir. It won’t take me a minute, and you can go over the drawings some more while I’m downstairs.”
    “I couldn’t eat that much. Maybe a fourth the size of yours——”
    “A small one, then. Be right up.”
    The colonel shook his head again, slowly, then chuckled gently to himself. He was studying Dehn’s drawings when the phone rang. Dehn had taken enough correspondence courses to function fairly well as an amateur draftsman, working smoothly with T-square and compass, and the sheet of graph paper tacked to the large oak board would probably be a satisfactory approximation of the architect’s blueprints of the Commercial Bank of New Cornwall.
    It was Manso on the phone. The colonel listened for a few moments, replied in monosyllables, then put the receiver on the hook. He looked again at the drawings but could not focus his mind on them. He thought instead of life and death, of crime and punishment, of the endless parade of eternal riddles.
    His Bible was on his desk. It was a large leather-bound volume, the cover rubbed and water-spotted, many of the pages stained. It had been in the Cross family for over a century. He held it in his hands now and remembered holding it as a boy and marveling at the date on the title page, BOSTON: MDCCCLVII. 1857 . When he first looked at it, the book had seemed ancient. Now he himself was very nearly as old as it had been then.
    Exodus, the twenty-first chapter. “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death. And if a man lie not in wait, but God deliver him into his hand; then I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee. But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die. . . . And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
    He placed his hands palms-down on the desk and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. He heard Dehn on the stairs, heard him at the doorway, but he did not move, and after a moment’s hesitation Dehn went back into the hallway.
    Cross flipped from the Old Testament to the New, from the Father to the Son. Matthew, V, 38-9. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
    The Old and the New, the Father and the Son. Was it a paradox?
    The Son died young, he thought. The young are different, they see with different eyes, they see what ought to be. And he thought, while wondering if the thought was blasphemous, that had the Son lived longer, His eyes and soul would have aged with Him, He would have grown more like His Father. He would have resisted evil, He would have returned eye for eye.
    Cross pushed himself back from the desk, coughed a signal to Dehn. The ice cream, he discovered, was a treat. Not something he would care for once a day, certainly. In fact, an interval of thirty years between such dishes struck him as about right. But it was undeniably a treat.
    “Manso called,” he said. “The bodyguard is dead.”
    “Rice?”
    “Burton Riess or Buddy Rice, as you prefer. Arsonist, murderer, bodyguard, and chauffeur. Edward said there were no complications.”
    “That’s good news,