Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  But it was me the man in the sideburns had chosen to talk to; perhaps the portions of my face not covered by the mask looked less intimidating than the portions of Joe’s face not covered by his mask. “As you know,” he said to me, “none of us has been permitted to go home for dinner. I don’t know about my companions, but I’m getting hungry. Would it be all right for us to have something to eat?”

  How the hell did I know? I said, “Do you have any food here?”

  “No, but we could send out,” he said.

  Send out? In the middle of a bank robbery? Helplessly, I said, “I don’t think—”

  “It’s a fairly common practice,” he assured me. “I suppose you’ve cased the joint—that is what you say, isn’t it?”

  I’d never said any such thing in my life. “That’s what we say,” I agreed.

  “Then you know,” he said, “that whenever we’re going to be working here, we do order out for food.” Then Joe said, “I’m getting a little hungry myself.” He turned to Phil. “What about you?”

  “Good idea,” Phil said. “We’ll order from the luncheonette.”

  The man with the sideburns said, “The place across the street? That’s terrible. Durkey’s is better, around the corner on Massena Street.”

  “Okay,” Phil said. “You got the number?”

  “I believe it’s on the Rolodex on that desk there,” the man with the sideburns said.

  “Right.” Phil found the Rolodex, twirled it, and apparently found the number. “Right,” he said again, and pointed at me. (We weren’t using names with one another.) “Take everybody’s order,” he said.

  So I took everybody’s order. The man with the sideburns recommended the roast beef plate, which Joe and I both took, and the woman in the tweed skirt said the turkey diet plate was first-rate for anyone concerned with calories; Jerry took that. For the rest, it was a standard run of hamburgers, BLTs, and so on. Plus the usual run of coffees, with two teas; Jerry, and the man in the red tie.

  I turned the list over to Phil, who looked at it, picked up the phone, turned to the Rolodex, stopped, looked at the list again, hung up the phone, and said, “I’m not gonna order out for ten people. There’s only three, four people here at night. They’ll know something’s going on.”

  “Excuse me,” the man with the sideburns said. “You could certainly go out and get the food yourselves, but in fact we occasionally do have up to a dozen people here through the dinner hour, in connection with audit or internal inventory or other procedures.”

  I knew I’d be the one sent out, I just knew it. So I said, “What do they care at the luncheonette? They’ll just bring the order over, that’s all.”

  “Not the luncheonette,” the man with the sideburns said. “Durkey’s, around the corner on Massena Street.”

  “I know,” I said. “Durkey’s.”

  Joe also came over to the desk where Phil was sitting. We three were clustered together now, with the four prisoners way the heck over on the other side of the room. Joe said, “You know, we better send out. We’ve seen them in the evening, you and me we both have, and they really do send out. And if we don’t tonight, with the lights on in the bank and all, maybe somebody’ll notice something and get a cop to check into it.”

  “The last thing we want,” the man with the sideburns said, “is a shoot-out, or a hostage-type situation.”

  That was the last thing I wanted, too. I said, “I tell you what. Order for five, and I’ll go out and get for the other five.”

  “Don’t go to the luncheonette,” the man with the sideburns advised me. “Go to Dur—”

  “I know, I know. Durkey’s, around the corner on Massena Street.”

  I thought he was slightly offended—not used to being interrupted, from the look of him. “That’s right” he said stiffly.

  Meanwhile, Phil was thinking over my proposition. “Fine,” he said at last. “You get five, I’ll call for five.”

  “Right.”

  So then we sat down and split the list into two parts, so that Phil would phone for all the larger items like roast beef plates, and I’d be getting the hamburgers. “I won’t call for five minutes,” Phil said. “Give you a little lead time.”

  “Fine.” I put the list in my pocket and glanced at the man with the sideburns, but he didn’t tell me to go to Durkey’s around the corner on Massena Street. In that silence I walked up front again where I explained to Eddie—he was one of the hamburgers and regular coffees—that I was going out to collect a partial order, but that the rest would be delivered. He said, “Where do I get the money to pay for it?”

  “Ask Phil.” I had cash on me, and planned to be reimbursed.

  “Okay,” he said, and unlocked the door to let me out. As I was going through he said, “Take your mask off.”

  “Oh! Right.”

  So I went around the corner to Durkey’s and put in my order. People were sitting around, eating, waiting for food. I’m in the middle of committing two bank robberies, I thought; what do you people think of that? They didn’t think much of it.

  I considered calling Marian, telling her to pack a bag and gas up the VW, and then the two of us would make a run for the border. Into Canada, get a job, establish a new name, make a new life. Never return, never be a party to this bank robbery again.

  My package was handed to me. I paid for it, and went back to the bank. As I was sorting it out on one of the desks, and figuring out who owed me what, the other half was delivered, and Eddie came back to get the cash to pay for it. So Phil walked into the vault and came out with two twenty dollar bills. “Don’t give him too big a tip,” he warned Eddie, and handed me the other twenty. “Here. You paid out of your pocket, right?”

  “This is too big a tip,” I said.

  He laughed. “Take it, take it,” he said. So I took it, and he said, “See? You get nervous ahead of time, but not during the job. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “I got you figured out pretty well, Harry,” he said.

  “You sure do,” I said. Then we all sat down and ate, and as I said to the man with the sideburns later, he was absolutely right: there was no comparison between Durkey’s and the luncheonette. “This roast beef plate is delicious,” I told him, as I was finishing it. “Thanks for recommending it.”

  “My pleasure,” he said. “We may have differences of opinion on some financial matters, but that doesn’t mean we can’t treat one another like human beings.”

  It’s really encouraging to hear a banker talk like that.

  43

  By two in the morning, it had become obvious we weren’t going to get into the Western National vault but Phil and Joe kept refusing to give up, no matter what reports Jerry and Billy staggered out with, and so another hour went by and it was after three before we finally gave up.

  Before that we’d had our visit from the police. That was around eleven-thirty. Eddie had just previously come back to report that a patrol car had gone by three times in the last twenty minutes, and that he had seen the two occupants looking curiously at the lit-up interior of Fiduciary Federal. “Don’t worry,” Phil told him. “We’re covered.”

  “I’m not worried,” Eddie said.

  I didn’t entirely believe him when he said it, but I must admit he carried off the police visit with assurance and calmness. They stopped just in front of the typewriter truck out front, and both of them got out of their car. They walked over to the door, which Eddie unlocked and opened in order to greet them. They asked where Duffy was, and Eddie said Duffy was home with the flu, which was going around again at that time. They asked what was happening to keep people at the bank so late, and Eddie told them it was some kind of audit. Then they just hung around, chatting, and it was obvious that while they weren’t exactly suspicious they weren’t exactly satisfied either.

  In the back, Jerry and Billy had suspended operations with the laser, and were panting together near the vault anteroom doorway, where t
hey reminded me of a team of stagecoach horses who have just outrun the band of Indians. At the partition, Phil and Joe and I listened to everything that was happening up front So, I presume, did our four prisoners.

  Finally, Phil muttered, “We got to take care of this.” He went over to the man with the sideburns and, speaking quietly, said, “You know the cops on this beat, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And they know you.”

  “I assume so.”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Phil said. “You’re going out where they can see you. Just walk across where they can see you, pick up a piece of paper off a desk or something, turn around and walk back here. On the way over, nod at them. You’d nod at them, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Fine. Nod at them.”

  “Very well,” he said, and nodded. “Now?”

  “Sure now.”

  The man with the sideburns got to his feet, brushed the wrinkles out of his suit, adjusted his tie and glasses, cleared his throat, and took a step.

  Phil said, “I didn’t threaten you.”

  The man with the sideburns stopped, and looked back at Phil.

  Phil gave him a grin, from under his mask. It scared even me, and I was on the guy’s side. “I don’t have to threaten you,” he said.

  The man with the sideburns was a very calm type. “No, you don’t,” he said, and went out and did exactly what Phil had told him to. He picked up a piece of paper from a desk over there, nodded at the cops, and walked back. “Fine,” Phil said. “Sit down again.”

  He gestured with the piece of paper. “I’ll want to put this back again if I may. I don’t want any more disruption of files than absolutely necessary.”

  “Sure thing,” Phil said. “Only wait a minute, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  And by the end of that exchange the cops had left. Seeing a face they knew, in calm circumstances, had convinced them. They went away, the man with the sideburns put the piece of paper back on the desk where it belonged, and we settled down to inactivity and boredom again.

  And the beginning of bad news from the vault. A total of ten cartons full of money had been packed from the Fiduciary Federal vault, which was all the cash Jerry and Billy found in there, but progress toward the Western National vault was slower than expected, and very difficult. The removal of the partitions had been a long slow process, requiring frequent intervals of no activity while metal was cooling, and the vault wall when they reached it turned out to be solid concrete, full of metal rods, heavy mesh and cable. Concrete was harder to laser than metal. They couldn’t slice away great pieces of it the way they’d done with the partitions; instead, they had to more or less melt every bit of it, turning it from concrete into lava, boring an ever-widening circle and trying for tiny advantages.

  The advantages were few, the disadvantages many. The concrete, in its molten form, ran down over other concrete yet to be melted, where it cooled and hardened again into something glasslike, much tougher than it had been before as concrete. Sometimes this glasslike skin wound up on top of concrete that itself had to be melted, so first the hardened lava had to be re-melted again.

  Also, the lava was dangerous to be around; it occasionally splashed, sometimes popped, and constantly ran. Jerry and Billy were both pretty well covered with burns before very long, and neither of them was happy about it. They were also getting redder and redder from all the heat in the vault, and sweat was literally running down them like cataracts. They were drinking water by the gallon, but it wasn’t enough; they were both losing moisture, and Jerry in particular could actually be seen losing weight. His red skin hung more and more loosely on his frame, and his face was drooping as though it were made of wax. Even Billy was wearing down, and I wouldn’t have believed that possible.

  But failure didn’t enter anybody’s conversation until shortly after midnight, when Jerry came out of one of his five-minute sessions in the vault, handed the laser to Billy, and came plodding moistly over to say to Phil, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  “What?” Phil brushed it away at once. “Sure we’ll make it,” he said. “You’re tired, sit down a while.”

  It was over an hour later, after one o’clock, when Billy for the first time said that it wasn’t going to happen. “We didn’t hit that other wall yet,” he said to Phil.

  “We’ll hit it any minute,” Phil assured him.

  Billy shook his head. “We won’t hit it at all,” he said. “We’ll never get through this first wall.” Then he turned and went back inside and took his five minutes.

  Between one and two, Phil and Joe gave Billy and Jerry frequent pep talks, which had no effect that I could see, and Eddie drifted back every once in a while to comment to the world at large that he didn’t believe in aborting missions.

  As for me, I kept quiet for some time, but eventually it seemed to me I had to start taking some sort of stand, so at the end of one of the pep talks I said to Phil, “You know, it’s almost two o’clock now, and we still aren’t out of this vault, much less into the other one. And we agreed we couldn’t stay after five.”

  “They’ll make it,” Phil told me.

  I didn’t say anything that time, but twenty minutes later when we had essentially the same conversation I said, “They won’t make it, Phil. We’re just wasting time here, and making those two guys work harder than they have to.”

  “We won’t quit,” Phil said.

  But we did. Jerry came out at three o’clock, gasping and weaving back and forth, and though Billy held his hand out for the laser Jerry walked right on by him, carried it over to where Phil was sitting at the desk, and dropped the laser onto the desk in front of him. “You do it,” he said.

  Phil just looked at him. It was hard to tell with the mask, but I think he was just bewildered, couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “I’m not doing any more,” Jerry said. “And neither is my buddy here. You do it.”

  “If there’s a problem—”

  “There’s a problem,” Jerry told him. “Go on in and take a look.”

  So Phil went in and took a look, and when he came out he seemed very shaken. “All right,” he said. “So it didn’t work out. We got half the dough.”

  We’d had possession of half the dough by six o’clock, nine hours ago, which neither I nor anybody else pointed out. Maybe because we were all too tired.

  So. Jerry and Billy wearily dressed themselves, while Joe tied and gagged the four prisoners under the watchful gun of Phil. I began carrying liquor store cartons of money up to the front, where I got to be the one to inform Eddie that we were aborting the mission. “I knew we should have held onto those hand grenades,” he said. “Always prepare for the unforeseen, that’s the way to run a successful operation.”

  By three-fifteen we were out of the bank. The cartons were in the typewriter truck, which Joe and Phil and I traveled in to the Dombey house. We unloaded the cartons into the basement, the Vasacapa corridor, and as we were finishing Jerry and Billy and Eddie showed up in a car they’d just stolen for the purpose. Joe took the typewriter truck away to return it, Phil took the stolen car away to dump it, and the rest of us crawled through to the gym in the prison, leaving the cartons in the Dombey basement.

  And that’s how I helped to rob a bank.

  44

  The two months following the robbery were completely uneventful, which I found startling. I was now a bona fide graduate bank robber, a hardened criminal, no stranger to guns and violence; and yet I was completely the same. And so was the world around me, the pattern of prison and tunnel and apartment and Marian, all exactly as it was before.

  Except that my financial problems had been relieved. I’d been eating into the three thousand my mother had sent me, pretending to commit stings now and again to explain where my cash was coming from, but that money couldn’t last forever. Particularly once I had an apartment of my ow
n, and a girlfriend. Now, with an additional nine thousand in the kitty, I might even make it through the two years till parole.

  Yes, nine thousand. We’d been hoping for a top of a hundred fifty thousand from the two banks, but of course we’d only managed to rob the one. Luckily, our half-accomplishment had been at the high end of our estimates. Just under seventy-three thousand dollars had been carried out of Fiduciary Federal in those liquor store cartons; divided equally among eight men it came to nine thousand one hundred twelve dollars apiece.

  Not bad for one night’s work. That’s one way to look at that number, as my fellow conspirators did. Pretty goddam small pickings to risk a life sentence for, that’s the way I looked at it. I just didn’t have the proper criminal attitude.

  Nevertheless we’d done it, and apparently we’d gotten away with it. Marian had no idea I’d been involved in the big bank robbery—the most exciting crime in Stonevelt’s history—and I saw no reason to burden her with the knowledge. As to Joe and Billy and the rest, now that the robbery had actually been performed they were all as calm and gentle and easygoing as well-fed horses. And lazy. Despite their sudden wealth, most of them hardly took a turn outside the prison at all for a while, meaning much more opportunity for me to be out; having to return every damn day for breakfast and dinner was becoming an annoyance, in fact.

  So March went out like a lamb, with April gamboling after. The weather improved, Marian and I took some outings in her Volkswagen, and Max developed a pleasant new girlfriend named Della; the four of us double-dated sometimes. I was happy and content, playing no practical jokes, putting on a little weight, wallowing in my happy life. Then, on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, the Mad Message Maker struck again.

  45