Free The Specialists by Lawrence Block

of the face. They were like the jewels in a watch. What made a watch worth several hundred dollars was not the two or three dollars worth of industrial diamonds but the craftsmanship that went into it. In the same way, the beauty in a human face came not from its inborn features but from the personality that came through it. When a girl looked dull and stupid, it was generally because she was a dull and stupid girl.
    “That was really one wonderful meal, Pat,” he told her. “I never would have picked that good a restaurant myself.”
    “I didn’t know if you’d like Italian food,” she said.
    “Oh, you can’t beat it.”
    “That’s about the best place around, everybody says.”
    Then everybody was crazy, Giordano thought. All pasta dishes should be al dente , not overcooked like a mouthful of mush. And the sauces—his mother would put a bottle of ketchup on the table before she trotted out a sauce like that. Well, everybody had always said Neapolitans couldn’t boil water. The restaurant called itself the Breath of Naples, and that was accurate enough. The breath of Naples, he thought, was seventy percent garlic.
    He opened the car door for her, helped her inside, then walked around and got behind the wheel. He wondered how many people held car doors for her. Stop it, he told himself. You don’t just have to get through this evening. You have to string her for maybe a week, because she works in the place and knows the answers to questions you haven’t even thought up yet. And if you’re going to spend as much as a week fucking this side of beef, you have to sell yourself on her. Seducing her may not be a challenge, but you have to seduce yourself, and the first step is to stop taking mental potshots at the kid.
    He started the engine but left the transmission in Park. “I’ll tell you, Pat. I was thinking about a movie.”
    “Oh, that’s swell, Jordan.”
    Jordan Lewis, that was the name he’d given her. Very obvious and amateur, but he had one particular mental block—whenever he used aliases, he forgot them. Jordan Lewis he had used frequently in the past; he would at least be apt to remember it.
    “I checked a paper, the movies. There wasn’t too much of a selection.”
    “Every town in Jersey, they’ll have three theaters, and all over the whole state they just have three different movies.”
    “They call it block-booking,” he said. He decided it wasn’t unreasonable for him to know this. He had told her he was an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations. “But the point is, Pat, none of the movies appealed very much. There was one at a drive-in, but I’ll tell you the truth, I hate watching a movie at a drive-in.”
    “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I’m the same.”
    “You’ve got the screen way out in front of you and the sound booming next to your ear and it doesn’t seem real. And then all the crazy kids you find at those places.”
    “You don’t have to tell me.”
    He turned to her, a shy look on his face. “Any movie, though, I’ll tell you, Pat, a movie isn’t much of a treat for me. I must see three, four movies a week.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “What else do you do when you’re in a strange town and you don’t know anybody? To me a movie is part of being alone.”
    “I know what you mean. That television set, sometimes when I think of the time a person can sit in front of that box and just stare at it like a moron——”
    “I know exactly what you mean,” he said.
    He pulled away from the curb, drove slowly with both hands on the wheel. “What I like, what I really like, is just to talk to somebody. And that’s the rarest thing in the world.”
    “You must meet plenty of people, Jordan.”
    “But how many people do you meet that you can talk to? I mean really talk to. I mean relax and open up and talk.”
    “Look at all the people come into the bank. I know what you mean, it’s the same.”
    She wasn’t a bad kid, he