The Jugger Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  © 1965 by Richard Stark

  Foreword © 2009 by John Banville

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 1965 by Pocket Books. Reprinted in 2002 by

  Mysterious Press.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77102-1 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77102-4 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77285-1(e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933–

  The jugger / Richard Stark ; with a new foreword by John Banville.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A Parker novel, which has the main character in Sagamore, Nebraska, at the request of Joe Sheer, a retired safe cracker who carries many of Parker’s criminal secrets.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77102-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77102-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Parker (Fictitious character). I. Banville, John. II. Title.

  PS3573.E9J84 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008042432

  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.

  Praise for Richard Stark and the Parker novels:

  “Super-ingenious, super-lethal. . . . Parker is super-tough.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Westlake’s ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Parker is a brilliant invention. . . . What chiefly distinguishes Westlake, under whatever name, is his passion for process and mechanics. . . . Parker appears to have eliminated everything from his program but machine logic, but this is merely protective coloration. He is a romantic vestige, a free-market anarchist whose independent status is becoming a thing of the past.”

  —Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books

  “Richard Stark’s Parker . . . is refreshingly amoral, a thief who always gets away with the swag.”

  —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

  “Elmore Leonard wouldn’t write what he does if Stark hadn’t been there before. And Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t write what he does without Leonard. . . . Old master that he is, Stark does them all one better.”

  —L.A. Times

  “Westlake is among the smoothest, most engaging writers on the planet.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  “One of the most original characters in mystery fiction has returned without a loss of step, savvy, sheer bravado, street smarts, or sense of survival.”

  —Mystery News

  “The Parker novels . . . are among the greatest hardboiled writing of all time.”

  —Financial Times (London)

  “No one can turn a phrase like Westlake.”

  —Detroit News and Free Press

  “Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Stark, a pseudonym of the venerable and wildly prolific author Donald E. Westlake, is a mystery connoisseur’s delight. . . . A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Donald E. Westlake writes as Richard Stark when he wants to see how far he can push it.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

  “Richard Stark is the Prince of Noir.”

  —Martin Cruz-Smith

  The Jugger

  RICHARD STARK

  With a New Foreword by John Banville

  The University of Chicago Press

  Contents

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part 2

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part 3

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part 4

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  THE PARKER NOVELS

  John Banville

  It was in the 1960s that Richard Stark began writing his masterly series of Parker novels—at last count there were twenty-four of them—but they are as unrepresentative of the Age of Aquarius as it is possible to be. Try imagining this most hardened of hard-boiled criminals in a tie-dyed shirt and velvet bell-bottoms. Parker does not do drugs, having no interest in expanding his mind or deepening his sensibilities; he cares nothing for politics and is indifferent to foreign wars, although he fought or at least took part in one of them; he would rather make money than love and would be willing to give peace a chance provided he could sneak round the back of the love-in and rob everybody’s unattended stuff. When he goes to San Francisco it is not to leave his heart there—has Parker got a heart?—but to retrieve some money the Outfit owes him and kill a lot of people in the process.

  The appeal of the conventional crime novel is the sense of completion it offers. Life is a mess—we do not remember being born, and death, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wisely observed, is not an experience in life, so that all we have is a chaotic middle, bristling with loose ends, in which nothing is ever properly over and done with. It could be said, of course, that all fiction of whatever genre offers a beginning, middle, and end—even Finnegans Wake has a shape—but crime fiction does it best of all. No matter how unlikely the cast of suspects or how baffling the strew of clues in an Agatha Christie whodunit or a Robert Ludlum thriller, we know with a certainty not afforded by real life that when the murderer is unmasked or the conspiracy foiled, everything will click into place, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself before our eyes. The Parker books, however, take it as a given that if something can go wrong, it will, and that since something always can go wrong, it invariably does.

  Indeed, this is how very many of the Parker stories begin, with things going or gone disastrously awry. And Parker is at his most inventive when at his most desperate.

  We first encountered Parker in The Hunter, published in 1962. His creator, Donald Westlake, was already an established writer—he adopted the pen name Richard Stark because, as he said in a recent interview, “When you’re first in love, you want to do it all the time,” and in the early days he was writing so much and so often that he feared the Westlake market would soon become glutted.

  Born in 1933, Westlake is indeed a protean writer and, like Parker, the complete professional. Besides crime novels, he has written short stories, comedies, science fiction, and screenplays—his tough, elegant screenplay for The Grifters, adapted from a Jim Thompson novel, was nominated for an Academy Award. Surely the finest movie he wrote, however, is Point Blank, a noir masterpiece based on the first Parker novel, The Hunter, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin. Anyone who saw the film will consider Marvin the quintessential Parker, though Westlake has said that when he first created his relentless hero—hero?—he imagined him looking more like Jack Palance.

  In that first book, The Hunter, Parker was a rough diamond—“I’d done nothing to make him easy for the reader,” says Westlake, “no small talk, no quirks, no pets”—and looked like a classic pulp fiction hoodlum:

  He was big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms to
o long in sleeves too short. . . . His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. (p. 3–4)

  Even before the end of this short book, however, we see Westlake/Stark begin to cut and burnish his brand-new creation, giving him facets and sharp angles and flashes of a hard, inner fire. He has been betrayed by his best friend and shot by his wife, and now he is owed money by the Outfit—the Mafia, we assume—and he is not going to stop until he has been repaid:

  Momentum kept him rolling. He wasn’t sure himself any more how much was a tough front to impress the organization and how much was himself. He knew he was hard, he knew that he worried less about emotion than other people. But he’d never enjoyed the idea of a killing. . . . It was momentum, that was all. Eighteen years in one business, doing one or two clean fast simple operations a year, living relaxed and easy in the resort hotels the rest of the time with a woman he liked, and then all of a sudden it all got twisted around. The woman was gone, the pattern was gone, the relaxation was gone, the clean swiftness was gone. (p. 171)

  The fact is, though Parker himself would be contemptuous of the notion, he is the perfection of that existential man whose earliest models we met in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. If Parker has ever read Goethe—and perhaps he has?—he will have recognized his own natural motto in Faust’s heaven-defying declaration: “Im Anfang war die Tat” [In the beginning was the deed]. Donald Westlake puts it in more homely terms when he says that, “I’ve always believed the books are really about a workman at work, doing the work to the best of his ability,” and when in the context of Parker he refers to “Hemingway’s judgment on people, that the competent guy does it on his own and the incompetents lean on each other.”

  In Parker’s world there is no law, unless it is the law of the quick and the merciless against the dim and the slow. The police never appear, or if they do they are always too late to stop Parker doing what he is intent on doing. Only twice has he been caught and—briefly—jailed, once after the betrayal by his wife and Mal Resnick, which sets The Hunter in vengeful motion, and another time in the recent Breakout. Parker treats the law-abiding world, that tame world where most of us live, with tight-lipped impatience or, when one or other of us is unfortunate enough to stumble into his path and hinder him, with lethal efficiency. Significantly, it is the idea of a killing that he has never enjoyed; this is not to say that he would enjoy the killing itself, but that he regards the necessity of murder as a waste of essential energies, energies that would be better employed elsewhere.

  Violence in the Parker books is always quick and clean and all the more shocking in its swiftness and cleanliness. In one of the books—it would be a spoiler to specify which—Parker forces a young man to dig a hole in the dirt floor of a cellar in search of something buried there, and when the thing has been found, the scene closes with a brief, bald line informing us that Parker shot the young fellow and buried him in the hole he had dug. In another story, Parker and one of his crew tie a hoodlum to a chair and torture some vital information out of him, after which they lock him in a closet, still chairbound, and depart, indifferent to the fact that no one knows where the hoodlum is and so there will be no one to free him.

  With the exception of the likes of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and Georges Simenon—that is, the Simenon not of the Maigret books but of what he called his romans durs, his hard novels—all crime writers are sentimentalists at heart, even, or especially, when they are at their bloodiest. In conventional tales of murder, mayhem, and the fight for right, what the reader is offered is escape, if only into the dream of a world where men are men and women love them for it, where crooks are crooks and easily identified by the scars on their faces and the Glocks in their fists, where policemen are dull but honest and usually dealing with a bad divorce, where a good man is feared by the lawless and respected by the law-abiding: in short, where life is otherwise and better. In the Parker books, however, it is the sense of awful and immediate reality that makes them so startling, so unsettling, and so convincing.

  As the series goes on, Parker has become more intricate in motivation and more polished in manner—his woman, Claire, the replacement for his wife Lynn, the one who shot him and subsequently committed suicide, is a fascinating creation, forbearing, loving, nurturing, the perfect companion for a professional—yet in more than forty years his creator has never allowed him to weaken or to mellow. The most recent caper, Dirty Money, published in 2008, ends with a vintage exchange between Parker, a woman, and a grifter who was foolish enough to try pulling a fast one on Parker:

  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,” she said.

  “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.

  And that is about as much as Parker, or Richard Stark, is ever willing to allow to anyone.

  PART ONE

  1

  When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. He put the paper down and looked around the room, and everything was clean and ordinary. He walked over and opened the door.

  The little guy standing there was dressed like he was kidding around. Dark green trousers, black-and-white shoes, orange shirt with black string tie, tweed sport jacket with leather elbow patches. The fluffy corners of a lavender handkerchief peeped up from his jacket pocket. His left hand was negligently tucked into his trouser pocket, and his right hand was stuck inside his jacket like an imitation of Napoleon. He had the lined and leathery weasel face of an alky or a tout, and he was both. He was somewhere past forty, short of eighty.

  He grinned, showing big bad teeth, and said, “Parker, you’re an ugly man. You’re uglier with the new face, and that’s a wonder.”

  Parker recognized him. His name was Tiftus and he claimed to be a lock man. Parker had never worked with him because he was too unreliable.

  Tiftus grinned some more and said, “Invite me in, why don’t you? We’ve got talk to do.”

  It couldn’t be coincidence; this had to be something to do with Joe Sheer. But Parker, to make sure, said, “About what? What talk would we have?”

  “Not in the hall, Parker. Where’s your manners?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Tiftus kept on grinning. He shook his head and withdrew his right hand from his jacket far enough for Parker to see the silver sparkle of a Hi-Standard .25-caliber automatic. “Be nice,” he said. “We have a nice talk about old times. And old friends.”

  So it was about Joe. Parker stepped back and motioned for Tiftus to come in. Smug as a peacock, Tiftus stepped over the threshold and into Parker’s right hand. Parker chopped him midway between belt buckle and automatic, and Tiftus’ face turned from tan leather to grey elephant skin. Parker plucked the automatic from his hand, yanked him farther into the room, and shut the door.

  Tiftus was making a sound in his throat like an air-raid siren heard from far away. Parker pushed him into the room’s one armchair, and went over to the window to look out. Captain Younger was still down there under his cowboy hat, leaning against the fender of his black Ford in the September sunlight. Across the way was the railroad station. Sagamore, Nebraska. The few cars going by on the main street were dusty in the sunlight.

  No one else seemed to be hanging around, not outside. If Tiftus had anyone with him, they were either in the lobby downstairs or waiting for him out of sight somewhere.

  Parker put the little automatic in the drawer of the writing table and looked over at Tiftus, but he was still sitting ramrod-straight in the
chair, forearms clamped to his belly, the air-raid siren still keening far away in the back of his throat.

  Parker took the time to finish looking at the paper. He’d already opened it to the obituaries. He looked down the list, and found it, under Joe’s alias:

  SHARDIN—Joseph T., Sept. 17, no living relations. Funeral Wednesday 10 a.m. Bernard Gliffe Funeral Chapel, Interment Greenlawn Cemetery.

  Wednesday; today. Ten a.m. He looked at his watch, and it was after eleven now, so the funeral was probably over. It wouldn’t have taken long, with nobody there who knew Joe.

  He turned back to the first page and went through the paper completely, reading all the headlines, looking for some reference to the way Joe died, but there was no mention of Joe at all except the obituary notice. The notice didn’t say what Joe died of.

  There was a photo on page seven of Captain Abner L. Younger and three other stocky types at a Safety First Conference, figuring out how to keep the schoolchildren from being killed by bad drivers. The cowboy hat made it tough to see Younger’s eyes.

  Parker closed the paper finally and went over to stand in front of Tiftus, who was now breathing again. Tiftus’ face had changed color one more time, now being flat white all over except for pained brown eyes and two round red spots of color on leathery cheeks, looking like rouge painted on there to make him look like a clown. He was breathing with his mouth open, and watching Parker with his pained eyes, but he didn’t say anything. The bright clothing looked even more out of place than it had before.

  Parker said, “You want to talk. Talk.”

  Tiftus moved his lips, but he didn’t say anything. Then he closed his mouth, and swallowed noisily, and licked his tongue across his dry lips, and finally he did talk, saying, “You didn’t have to do that.” His voice sounded rusty. “I almost threw up,” he said. He sounded offended.

  Parker said, “How old are you, Tiftus? A hundred? You don’t know about guns, at your age? Don’t ever show a gun to a man you don’t want to kill. You’re a moron, Tiftus. Now, what did you want to talk about?”