Surrounded

conceive, plan, and execute an intricate crime when he could not even manage to keep his own living room clean? What was wrong with Clitus Felton? Why would he work with a man like this? Or was it possible that the old man had known Meyers years ago when he was something better than he seemed to be now?
        Meyers, returned from the kitchen and gave Tucker his drink. He took his own whiskey over to one of the easy chairs and, holding the small glass in both hands, sat down.
        For the first time Tucker saw that the man reflected his sloppily kept apartment. His trousers were unpressed, his white shirt a rumpled mess. He had not shaved in a couple of days, and his yellow whiskers were beginning to cast soft shadows over his face.
        "You aren't what I expected," Meyers said.
        "Oh?"
        "I thought you'd be older."
        "I'm twenty-nine," Tucker said.
        "That's awfully young." Meyers sipped his whiskey and watched Tucker over the rim of the glass. His eyes were wide and slightly bloodshot.
        "You?" Tucker asked.
        "Forty-one."
        "You aren't that far ahead of me."
        "How long you been in the business?"
        "About three and a half years," Tucker said.
        "Pulled my first job more than twenty years ago." He sounded faintly nostalgic, like a high school jock recalling his biggest game, as if he longed to relive those early years.
        That was a bad sign. When a man began to yearn for the past, he was not doing very well in the present. And when a thief longed for the past, it also meant that he expected to get nailed by the cops in the near future. It meant he was losing faith in himself and that he could not be fully trusted.
        Tucker knew he should stand up and get out of there. He could see that Meyers was trouble.
        But he did need the money… His share from the hijacking of a Mafia cash collection, split only three months ago, had run out even though it had been a substantial sum. He lived extremely well, and he wanted to keep living extremely well, wanted to keep the Park Avenue apartment, the art work, all of it…
        He had been offered two other jobs recently, but he had turned them both down when they failed to meet one or the other of the three criteria he had set for a robbery. First of all he never robbed individuals, but hit institutions like insurance companies, banks, department stores-and the Mafia, once. Second, he would work only when he was the undisputed boss, when the plans for the operation were marked with his personal and careful attention to detail. Finally, the job had to feel good to him, had to appeal to some internal gauge that, as indescribable and indefinable as it was, had never yet failed him. He rejected a great many deals that ultimately worked out for other people. He passed up potentially rewarding opportunities. However, his caution and his three criteria had thus far kept him out of jail.
        "Something else about you," Meyers said, still looking at him over the whiskey glass.
        Tucker waited.
        "You don't look like what you are."
        Tucker still said nothing.
        "What do I look like?" Meyers asked. Then he answered his own question: "Muscle. I look like a cheap hood. That's how I got started, and I'll never shake the image." He finished his drink and put the glass on the water-ringed coffee table. "Everyone I ever worked with… You could tell they were in the business. It was stamped on them. But you look like some hot-shot young executive."
        "Thanks," Tucker said.
        "No offense meant."
        "Or taken."
        "I just meant that you don't look like a hood. And that's just great. That's a plus in this business."
        "I'm not a hood," Tucker said. "I'm a thief."
        "Same thing," Meyers said, though it was not the same thing at all to Tucker. "As clean cut as you look, you'd make a good front man in an operation."
        Tucker had been holding his vodka, but he had not drunk much of it. The day was too new to support liquor. Besides, after studying Frank Meyers and the man's apartment, Tucker wondered how well the glass had been washed. He finally put it down. "Speaking of operations, what about this one of yours?"
        "I still don't know much about you," the big man said, shifting uncomfortably in the easy chair.
        "What do you need to know?"
        "Clitus recommended you. I guess that ought to be