The Seventh Read online

  Praise for The Seventh and Richard Stark:

  “[T]he non-hero: the ruthless, unrepentant, single-minded operator in a humorless and amoral world. . . . No one depicts this scene with greater clarity than Richard Stark.”

  —Allen J. Rubin, New York Times Book Review

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

  —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

  “Donald E. Westlake (who writes as Richard Stark when he wants to see how far he can push it) has a wonderfully twisted mind that takes impish delight in knocking over its own elaborate plot constructions.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, 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

  “The Parker novels . . . are among the greatest hard-boiled writing of all time.”

  —Financial Times (London)

  “Richard Stark's Parker novels, a cluster of which were written in an extraordinary burst of creativity in the early '60s, are among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time.”

  —John Banville, Bookforum

  “The caper novel, the story of a major criminal operation from the point of view of the participants, has no better practitioner than Richard Stark.”

  —Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review

  “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

  “Richard Stark is the Prince of Noir.” —Martin Cruz-Smith

  “Gritty and chillingly noir . . . [Westlake] succeeds in demonstrating his total mastery of crime fiction.”

  —Booklist

  “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

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

  —San Diego Tribune

  Parker Novels By Richard Stark

  The Hunter (Payback)

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Outfit

  The Mourner

  The Score

  The Jugger

  The Seventh

  The Handle

  The Rare Coin Score

  The Green Eagle Score

  The Black Ice Score

  Deadly Edge

  Slayground

  Lemons Never Lie

  Plunder Squad

  Butcher's Moon

  Comeback

  Backflash

  Flashfire

  Firebreak

  Ask the Parrot

  Dirty Money

  The Seventh

  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: 978-0-226-77105-2 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77105-9 (paper)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933-2008.

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

  p. cm.

  Originally published under title: The split.

  Summary: The seventh book in the Parker series, this describes the aftermath of a brilliant heist at a college football game.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77105-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77105-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Parker (Fictitious character)— Fiction. 2. Criminals—Fiction. I. Sante, Luc. II. Title.

  PS3573.E9S48 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2009006775

  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.

  ISBN 978-0-226-77294-3 (electronic)

  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: José Giovanni, Albert Simonin, San-Antonio. The lean, efficient Giovanni in particular has points in common with Stark (Anglophones can 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 mo
st 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 Fantômas 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 Seventh 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

  PART ONE

  1

  When he didn't get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. Only the cheap bolt lock was fastened; the chain lock and the police lock were both open. Parker raised his foot and kicked the flat of his shoe against the door above the knob just one time, and the door popped open like it was surprised. It went with a dry cracking sound as pieces of doorframe ripped away from around the bolt. It was dry old wood in a rotten old building and it split easy.

  The door swung all the way open, the inner knob bumping finally against the side wall, but Parker didn't go in right away. He stood in the hall, under the twenty-five-watt bulb stuck in the ceiling, and waited and listened.

  The door stood open on a long narrow hall. All the rooms of the apartment opened off that hall, to the right. The kitchen was first, with light spilling out the doorway. Next was the bathroom, in darkness, that part of the hall dark also. Next the bedroom, soft light spreading out to the hallway from there. Last was the living-room, into which the hallway emptied. From out here on the other side of the apartment doorway Parker could look down the hall like looking down a long rectangular funnel and see an edge of the living-room at the far end, a dark brown mohair overstuffed armchair and a rickety dark wood table with a black telephone on it and the beginning of an imitation Persian rug. Also a floor lamp, standing beyond the armchair, lit now and making a soft glow out around its cream shade. There was another light source too, deeper in the living room, out of sight.

  Everything the way he'd left it. Light on in the kitchen, off in the bathroom, on in the bedroom and living-room. Bolt lock fastened on the front door, chain lock and police lock both unfastened. Everything the way he'd left it.

  Except he'd knocked twice just now and Ellie hadn't come to open the door.

  He'd gone downstairs ten minutes ago, to buy beer and cigarettes. The place on the corner was closed and he'd walked a block farther to the next place, and now he was back.

  Ordinarily he'd have sent Ellie, but he hadn't been out of the apartment in three days and he felt like having some fresh air. So he dressed, while she sat on the rumpled bed nude, cross-legged tailor fashion, smoking a filter cigarette and scratching herself. She kept yawning, but the yawns that come after sleep, not before. “I'll make us some eggs,” she offered, and he said: “Fine,” and then he left.

  And now, in ten minutes, something had managed to go wrong.

  She wouldn't have gone out. And she wouldn't have gone back to sleep. She should have heard him knock, and even if she hadn't she sure as hell should have heard him kick the door in.

  There was nothing in the apartment but silence.

  Parker felt naked standing out here under this twenty-five watt bulb, wearing nothing but clothes. He had no weapon —nothing but a bag with beer bottles and cigarette packages in it.

 
He put the paper bag down on the floor and reached just inside the doorway and around the other side of the split doorframe to where he'd leaned the bar of the police lock when he'd gone out. His fingers closed on it, and it was cold. He picked it up and stood hefting it. It was good iron, solid, three feet long. When it was in operation, one end was stuck at a slant into the metal plate in the floor behind the door, the other end in the locking mechanism on the door itself. With this bar wedged between door and floor, nobody would kick the door in; police lock was a good name for it.

  It would make a good weapon. Better than bare hands.

  Parker stepped across the threshold and shut the door behind him. It wouldn't shut all the way anymore. The hall was bright near to him, where light spilled out from the kitchen, and then dim farther on and softly glowing down at the living-room end.

  Parker moved noiselessly forward and looked into the kitchen. It was three inches bigger than a closet and filled with appliances. A white circular fluorescent light fixture meant for a room of normal size glared in the middle of the ceiling, reflecting balefully from all the porcelain and white enamel crowded into the little room. Dirty glasses, dirty pots, dirty dishes, were scattered all over every flat surface. Grocery bags full of rubbish were crammed together on the floor.

  No eggs had been started. Ellie wasn't in this room now, and it didn't look as though she'd been here at all.

  Parker moved on and switched on the bathroom light, and this room, too, was empty. He left the light on and went past there and when he got even with the bedroom doorway he looked in and she was sitting there on the bed.

  At first he didn't see the hilt, and he thought she'd just fallen asleep again.

  She was sitting there just the same as when he'd left, legs crossed tailor fashion, back against the headboard of the bed, arms at her sides. A faint wisp of smoke was coming up from the area of her left hand, so she was still smoking the cigarette. Or had started a new one by now.