So Marian was now an insider, and I was the only one present with a date at the Dombey dinner party at which I finally met Alice, and which was given mostly in my honor, to celebrate my return to full privileges.
The dinner party itself was a bit unreal. Alice Dombey, wife of a convicted professional forger, produced an incredibly complex and tasty dinner (Gourmet was one of the magazines she subscribed to) for eight AWOL cons who sat around making polite conversation with one another. Alice beamed genteelly at everybody, used her knife and fork as though it were an intricate skill she’d learned from a correspondence course, and actually extended her pinky when lifting her coffee cup.
At the other end of the scale, and the table, there was Billy Glinn, absentmindedly snapping chicken bones and crunching through his food as though he’d wind up by eating the plates. Jerry Bogentrodder became silly and giddy in Marian’s presence, coming on with her in the style of a collegian who has drunk too much at his first beer party. Max also came on with her, though both more subtly and more seriously; I was beginning to feel a bit ambivalent about that fellow.
As to the others, Phil and Joe spent most of the evening talking shop with one another: guns, alarms, lawyers, stolen goods. And Eddie Troyn kept popping in and out of his Captain Robinson persona—never in quite far enough to call me Lieutenant, but in enough for me to recognize the genial authoritarian style. And Bob Dombey, our host, was so clearly madly in love with his wife and his home, so patently proud of both, that the great warmth of his feeling filled the room with a kind of amber Dickensian glow.
Afterwards, Marian and I rode to her place in her Volkswagen, and she said, “I keep thinking it has to be a put-on. I know you’re a practical joker, and this is a whole elaborate rib. No way on Earth those people are crooks.”
“Oh, they’re crooks, all right,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned the bank robbery, or the stings by which the others supported themselves, and though I was tempted now I once more refrained. Even with Marian I didn’t feel that trust could be one hundred percent.
“Some of them I can believe,” she said. “Like that monster Billy Whatsisname.”
“Glinn.”
“Right. And Eddie Troyn, your Army friend. He seems crazy enough to commit anything. And Max Nolan; I knew a long time ago he couldn’t be trusted.”
That made me feel better. “There,” I said. “That’s half of them already.”
“Bob Dombey,” she said. “That’s no more a criminal than Santa Claus.”
“You ought to meet Andy Butler,” I said. “You can’t tell a book by its cover, honey.”
“That’s catchy,” she said.
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“And Jerry Whatsisname,” she said. “What did he do, cheat in an exam?”
“He’s a burglar and an armed robber,” I said, “and a general strongarm man.” I considered telling her that between one and three of the men at that dinner party had recently voted to murder the both of us, but that too I thought was best kept to myself. And I wondered which of them it had been, and just how close a margin I was alive by.
Conversation flagged after that. We arrived at Marian’s, and in the bedroom I said, “Be sure to set the alarm for four-thirty. I have to get back to the prison.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I would have been better off going to Mexico with Sonny.”
“No you don’t,” I said, and a while later she said, “All right, I don’t.”
34
Friday, January 14th, five days after the Dombey dinner party. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Once again I sat in the window booth at the luncheonette, staring in dulled terror toward the bank past Billy Glinn’s profile. Once again we were assembled here. Phil and Jerry and Billy and I, to rob that bank over there and that other bank over there, and this time so far as I could see we were going to do it. I kept praying for a miracle, such as that both banks would suddenly become swallowed by a hole in the ground, but no miracles were occurring. In half an hour the typewriter truck would arrive, with Joe and Eddie and the second typewriter Max had stolen for this operation, and we four would leave this table and walk across the street with our hands on the guns in our coat pockets, and we would rob those two banks.
Oh, God.
I had wanted to do something, I would have been willing to do something, but what was there to do? Another round of stink bombs would be a coincidence just too strong for somebody with the quick exasperated intelligence of a Phil Giffin to accept, and I did not want him thinking any more about practical jokers.
But what else was there? My mind seemed to work exclusively in the well-worn groove of practical jokes, and whenever I tried to come up with a scheme for thwarting the bank robbery it turned out to be no more than another practical joke. I was in the position of a man forbidden to operate within his specialty.
In fact, I had reached the stage now where my mind was teeming with nothing but practical jokes: jokes I’d done, jokes I’d heard of, tricks I’d pulled as a teenager and before. All sorts of foolish things. Phone somebody and ask if they’re on the bus line: “Yes, we are.” “Well, you better get off, there’s a bus coming.” Hang up and giggle. Phone a tobacconist and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” “Yes, we do.” “Well, let him out, he’ll suffocate.” Hang up and giggle. Call six cab companies and have them all send cabs to the same address, usually a disliked teacher. Hang up and giggle. Call—
It came to me. My head lifted, it was almost as though I’d heard the sudden faint ting of a bell. I looked at the luncheonette clock, and it was ten past five. Was there time? It had to happen before the truck got here, or we’d be worse off than ever.
I had to chance it. “I think I’ve got a nervous bladder,” I said. I had to say that because I’d already been to the men’s room twice in the past hour. Getting to my feet, I said, “I’ll be right back.”
“Right,” Phil said.
The rest rooms were at the back, through a door and down a corridor to the left. At the end of the same corridor were the two pay phones. I fumbled a dime out of my pocket, dropped it in one of the phones, and then realized I didn’t know the number.
I hung up, got the dime back, found the phone book on a shelf underneath the phone, and looked up the Fiduciary Federal Trust. Got it.
“Doucheeary Fedrul.”
“The manager, please.”
“Who’s calling please?”
“The man who planted the bombs in your bank,” I said. I looked over my shoulder, but the corridor was empty.
There was a tiny silence, and the female voice at the other end said, very quietly, “Would you say that again, sir?”
“You Establishment pigs are about to go up in smoke,” I said. “I’m calling from the Twelfth of July Movement, we’re the ones that made the raid on Camp Quattatunk, and we planted a couple bombs in that bank of yours this afternoon. They’re going off at five-thirty. We don’t kill people, just money and pig Establishment banks. So this is a friendly warning. Get your asses out of there before five-thirty.”
“One, uh, one moment, please.” She believed me; I could hear the jittering nervousness in her voice. “I’ll put you on hold,” she said.
A sudden vision came to me of the call being traced. “No, you won’t,” I said. “I gave you the word, so just heed what I said. Up the Revolution!” And I hung up.
I did have a nervous bladder. After a visit to the men’s room, I returned to the table and sat down and looked out at a perfectly quiet normal street scene. It was eighteen minutes past five. There was no one visible inside the bank except the guard, who was standing by the front door with his usual calm.
What the hell had happened to that girl? Maybe she hadn’t believed me, after all. But how could she take such a chance?
Twenty after. Twenty-three after. Why wasn’t something happening?
“By God,” Phil said, “I believe it’s gonna work this time.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Twenty-five after. Twenty-six after.
Jerry said, “Here comes the truck.”
“He’s early!” I said, and I just couldn’t keep the protest out of my voice.
“Just as well,” Phil said. “We’ll go in and get the fucking thing over with before something else goes wrong.”
The red truck stopped in front of the bank. Joe, moving with such studied casualness, such elaborate calm, that I would have mistrusted him from half a mile away, got out of the truck, slammed the door, and walked around to the back to get the typewriter.
“Get ready,” Phil said, and a siren sounded in the distance.
Joe froze, his head and arms in the back of the truck.
Jerry said, “Oh, no.”
Oh, yes. Joe was in motion again, slowly removing the typewriter, but then the police car slowed to a stop directly behind the truck, its front grill practically kissing the seat of Joe’s pants, and both cops jumped out of the car and ran over to the bank entrance. The guard opened for them, as Joe with the same slow elaborate unconcern put the typewriter back inside the truck, closed the rear door, sauntered around to the driver’s door, climbed in, and drove slowly and safely away.
A crowd was forming in front of the bank. The flasher light was revolving atop the police car. The other employees had now come running from the rear of the bank, and a great deal of conversation was taking place between them and the cops in the doorway.
And more sirens were sounding, coming this way.
Phil put his right elbow on the table and rested his jaw in the palm of his right hand. I have never seen anybody look so disgusted in my life, and I’ve seen people drink salted coffee, put their feet into shoes half-full of strawberry jam, and enter beds in which the sheets have been liberally treated with lard. But Phil topped them all.
A fire engine arrived. Another police car arrived. Another fire engine arrived.
Phil said, “Jerry—”
“I know,” Jerry said. He got up and left the luncheonette and went across the street, mingling with the crowd around the bank.
“What a mess,” I said.
Billy Glinn was frowning like a Parker House roll. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I just don’t get it.”
A bomb squad vehicle arrived; on a truck bed stood the world’s largest wicker basket, painted red. “Holy Jesus,” Billy said.
Jerry came back across the street. He came in and sat down and said, “Bomb scare.”
Phil looked at him. “Bomb scare,” he said.
“Some revolution group planted bombs in the bank,” Jerry said.
Phil took a deep breath. I thought he controlled himself very well. “I don’t piss off all that easy,” he announced, “but I’m getting there.”
“One thing,” Jerry said, hopefully, trying to make Phil feel better. “At least Joe kept the typewriter this time.”
35
The following Monday, Max and I took an apartment together in town.
He had mentioned the idea before, but we hadn’t done anything about it, and when he brought it up again on Saturday, the day after the third abortive attempt to rob the bank, I spoke with him frankly about my feelings of ambivalence toward him. He had, after all, broken a promise to me to keep a secret of mine, and he had also come on a bit heavily toward my girlfriend during the Dombey dinner party.
He said, “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Why I talked to Phil is, we got a very delicate arrangement here, and I think it’s a bad idea if we start keeping secrets from one another. You’d explained the situation to me in a way that I had to go along with, and I figured I could pass it on to the others and they’d go along with it, too. And they did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d do that?”
“Argue with you? You were terrified, man, you figured if the boys found out it was all up. So I kept you calm, and I carried your message, and it worked out.”
It all made sense, and I believe it was all basically true, but I also remembered that the vote to keep Marian and me alive had not been unanimous. On the other hand, I also remembered that it was Max who’d told me that. And it had, after all, worked out. “But what about Marian?” I said.
“I come on to all the girls, man,” he said. “They expect it. But I’m not gonna steal your chick. Ask her yourself.”
All right, he wasn’t. I knew Marian, and I knew Max wouldn’t steal her even if he wanted to. So that was also okay.
If you wait to make friends exclusively with people that you don’t have to feel ambivalent about at all, you won’t have many friends. “So we’ll take an apartment,” I said, and on Monday we did, using the previous day’s local newspaper.
The first place we looked at was a pleasant enough apartment, but the landlady was a compulsive talker, and her talk was limited almost exclusively to questions—“You boys born around here?” “Do you know Annie Tyrrell, works at the Officer’s Club out to the Camp?” and so on—and both Max and I agreed at once that she’d drive us crazy within a week. There weren’t enough lies in the world to satisfy her craving for answers, and God knows we didn’t have any truths to tell her.
At the second place, an attic apartment in a private home with a tacked-on outside staircase to give the place a separate entrance, the landlady didn’t talk too much at all. In fact, she very nearly talked too little; we were on the verge of taking the place when she let it drop that her husband was a guard over at the prison. “Sorry, lady,” Max said, as we left her attic with orderly haste, “but heights give me nosebleed.”
The third one was it. The block was neat, quiet, residential— very like the one around the Dombeys’ house, but without that giant prison wall across the street. The house had an enclosed front porch full of mohair furniture, and the woman who responded to our ring, a frail faded skinny lady in her fifties, told us her name was Mrs. Tutt. She spoke in a failing voice, her brow was furrowed with anxiety, she constantly washed her hands together or clutched her bony elbows, and she seemed ever to be on the edge of telling us the reason for her despair. When I mentioned the ad for the furnished apartment, she said, “Oh, yes,” speaking so mournfully I fully expected her next to say that unfortunately it had just burned to the ground.
But she didn’t. Instead she said, “I’ll show it to you,” and came out of the house to lead the way around to the driveway and back toward a simple white clapboard one-car garage. “We don’t have a car any more,” she said mournfully, “since Roderick had the accident.”
I felt I didn’t want to ask any questions.
The garage was the apartment. It stood at the rear of the property, flanked by a nicely green back yard, and it had been converted to living quarters, but not very much. It still, for instance, had its original overhead door; basically, one entered the place by lifting the living-room wall.
Inside, a plywood platform had been built over the original concrete flooring, with plumbing and electric wiring in the underneath space. Green-flecked indoor-outdoor wall-to-wall carpeting covered the living-room plywood, which bounced gently beneath our feet, like a discreet trampoline.
“Elwood’s quite a handyman,” Mrs. Tutt said, and washed her hands in despair.
The living-room walls were cheap maple paneling. With the door up, nothing showed of the front wall but a length of rope dangling from one corner of the cardboard-like dropped ceiling. Max pulled this rope and the wall door descended, revealing a paneled interior.
Mrs. Tutt said, “In the summer, you could leave that open and have a nice breeze.”
The furniture in the room seemed to have come from some motel’s bankruptcy sale: sofa, chairs, end tables, coffee table, all repeating the maple-tone motif of the paneling. Washed-out prints of Caribbean-scene watercolors were spotted around the walls, including two fastened to the wall door.
Max and I explored deeper. The one bedroom was seven feet long and six feet wide. Grayish paneling, blue-flecked indoor-outdoor c
arpet, one window in the side wall. A double bed, a maple dresser, a maple chair. Behind a line of louvered doors in the end wall were closets.
The bathroom. Three feet by four. One window. Toilet, sink and shower, all basically built on top of one another. Lavender tile.
The kitchen. Avocado sink, avocado stove, avocado refrigerator. Yellow formica counter, the size of a pizza box. A wallpaper of avocados on a yellow background. Yellow metal cabinets. An extremely narrow window over the extremely narrow sink. Floor-space the size of an airmail stamp, covered in yellow vinyl tile.
“Elwood laid it all out himself,” Mrs. Tutt told us, and through her despair a note of pride could be heard in Elwood’s accomplishment. “He didn’t have no architect to help him or nothing.”
“Mm hm,” I said, and Max said, “Is that right?”
Mrs. Tutt became silent. She had shown us everything, she had regaled us with her store of anecdotes—Roderick, Elwood— and now there was nothing left but our decision. Clutching her elbows, hunching her shoulders, she gazed dismally at us.
Max glanced at me. “What do you think?” he said.
I looked around. It was amazing; here in this small upstate New York town, far from the world, thirty years of family-handymanism, of do-it-yourselfitis, had reached its apotheosis in this one-car garage. “It’s,” I said, “the ugliest thing I ever saw in my life.”
“Right,” he said.
“So we’ll take it,” I said.
“Right,” he said. He turned to Mrs. Tutt, “We’ll take it.”
36
Life, like the Army, is a case of hurry-up-and-wait. After all the frantic chaos of December and much of January, life suddenly settled down into something that could almost be described as placid; though a life composed of four or five jail-breaks a week can never truly be described as placid, I suppose.
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Page 17
