A Pure Double Cross

by John Knoerle

  “She shot me down,” I said, shaking my head sorrowfully. “She’s a devoted wife all of a sudden!”

  Jimmy nodded and slapped me on the shoulder so hard my teeth hurt. “Broads.”

  “Yeah, broads.”

  I stood up and stretched. “You got that gun handy?”

  “When the time comes.”

  I grunted and ankled off. Jimmy wasn’t going to make this easy. I went to the kitchen and collected what I needed.

  I was jumpy as a hamster when I closed the door to my room. Something was eating me, gnawing at the foundations. I sat on the bed and kicked off my shoes. I got up and paced the room in my stocking feet. The brass band above my right temple started playing, soft but quick.

  This better not be an attack of conscience, Schroeder. This better not be an attack of conscience brought on by religious statuary. Not now. You’re not an altar boy anymore. You were given a rare gift at a tender age. You were dropped from an airplane into the real world and got to see its inner workings close up. Bloody death and spectacular destruction, celebrated as victory.

  Money, Schroeder. Money equals power equals control equals freedom. Go and get your money and leave the rest for later.

  This little pep talk calmed me not a whit. I left a trail of garments behind me on my way to a scalding hot shower.

  My scattered clothes were missing when I emerged from the shower ten minutes later, my spirits lifted, my insides untangled, a towel wrapped around my waist. Check that. My clothes sat neatly folded on the foot of the bed.

  I was glad for the towel. Lizabeth was perched on the side of the bed in her chiffon nightgown.

  I was pleased to see her, don’t get me wrong. What red-blooded American male wouldn’t be pleased to see Lizabeth sitting on their bed in a filmy peignoir, a tray of ointments resting on her lap, Clara Barton meets Lana Turner. But the house was crawling with heavily armed men who might disapprove.

  I approached warily. My bed had been tucked and folded into a bounce-a-nickel-off-the covers bunk. Lizabeth dangled my wristwatch from her fingers.

  “This yours?”

  “Yes,” I said, moving closer. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Underneath your bed.”

  “Oh.”

  I should’ve looked there maybe. I accepted the dangled watch and hooked it to my wrist. It was 10:26 p.m. Less than 24 to H-Hour. Lizabeth patted the bed. I jumped up and adjusted my towel. Lizabeth set to work on me, stem to stern.

  “What happened here?” she said, applying Unguentene to my scabbed over ankles.

  “Birdshot,” I said.

  “Where from?”

  “Jimmy’s sawed-off.”

  “He’s a wrong number, that one,” said Lizabeth. “Scoot over.”

  I did as I was told. Lizabeth unpeeled the tightly-wrapped bed covers. “Climb in,” she said. I did that too. “Give me your towel.”

  I unwrapped myself under the blanket. Lizabeth folded the towel precisely, absent-mindedly. I shivered on the cold sheets in my nakedness. What was this about?

  “Henry won’t let me anywhere near him,” she said and sat down next to me atop the covers. “Tomorrow’s the biggest day of his life and he won’t let me near him.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Lizabeth kicked off her mules and stretched out. Her toenail polish was dark red.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About this bank job being ‘crazy.’ I’ve been having the most awful dreams.” Lizabeth parted her nightgown and reached into her garter belt. “Got a light?” she said, waving a perfumed cigarette.

  I wrenched my gaze from her silken thighs to her sea green eyeballs. “Just press it to my forehead.”

  Lizabeth laughed and rolled over and pulled the covers down to my waist and wrapped me up in a steaming hug. I felt myself responding, felt my hands creeping up to bury themselves in that perfect flesh. My conscience ran up and down empty corridors, looking for an exit from this four alarm fire, screaming, This is wrong! This is dangerous!

  My hands didn’t listen. They were under her nightgown now, coursing up the back of her acutely lithesome legs, past the tender indent of her knees, sweeping upward toward sweet disaster.

  Lizabeth’s tears doused the blaze in short order. There weren’t many against my shoulder, just enough. My hands moved from her thighs to her shoulders. She shook a while. I held her. She shook a while longer.

  “It’s okay,” I said, whispered. “Everything will work out fine.”

  Lizabeth removed her face from my shoulder. Her runny mascara made her look like an extremely fetching raccoon.

  “Will it?” she said. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. I just said it because that’s what you’re supposed to say when you reassure someone.”

  Lizabeth studied me through half-shuttered lamps. “Then it’s not very reassuring, is it?”

  We laughed and held each other some more. Tentatively, somewhere between comfort and passion. It had grown quiet downstairs. What was this about?

  I held on till my arms numbed. Lizabeth disengaged first, rolling over, head propped on her hand, her blue-veined breasts swelling above the opaque sheath. She ran her finger down the side of my neck and along the ridge of my collarbone.

  “I’ve decided that I like my life the way it is. And you’ve dodged enough bullets for one lifetime.” She leaned over and planted a soft kiss on my bandaged ear. “Will you tell Henry that this Federal Reserve job is too risky, too dangerous?”

  Lizabeth’s alabaster hand slid down my chest and kept going. “Will you do that for me, Hal?” she breathed.

  I snagged her hand by the wrist and sat up.

  “Not a chance.”

  Lizabeth yanked her hand away and strode from the room without a word. I shut the light, put my head down and fell asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I woke up a couple hours later, checked my watch and went back to sleep.

  When I opened my eyes again it was 2:42 a.m. I got up, opened the door and listened hard. Not a creature was stirring.

  I threw on my clothes and stripped the bed, knotting the sheets together. I grabbed two more sheets from the closet and knotted them to the train. This was doing things the hard way but I couldn’t risk creeping down the stairs with Kingdog lurking.

  I walked the bed frame to the window, tied the train of sheets to a bed leg, opened the window and tested the length of my lanyard. Couple feet short. My flannel shirt was too old and frayed. My blanket was too thick to knot, ditto the bath towels. I looked around, I looked down. My wool trousers were stout as canvas but how to link them to the chain?

  Heh heh heh.

  I stepped out of my pants and threaded the tip of the bed sheet through the fly and zippered it up snug and tight. I tugged, it held. I opened the window, lowered this raggedy lan-yard to the ground and climbed down.

  You have not truly experienced cold until you have climbed down the side of a building in northeast Ohio on a wind-whipped night in mid-December in your underwear.

  I scissor kicked the side of the building to propel myself over the hedges and dropped to the ground with a crunch. The late night freeze had crusted the snowdrifts with ice. I was so cold I was almost warm.

  I removed my sophisticated saboteur’s kit from the pockets of my hanging trousers and slogged to the front of the building, my legs on fire. A black panel truck sat parked in the circular drive next to the Packard. I unscrewed the gas cap, inserted the funnel I had filched from the kitchen and poured in the bag of sugar.

  I had considered more surefire methods - removing the distributor rotor, cutting plug wires - but the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank wheeze had the advantage of stealth. The truck would start right up the next day, drive a few miles down the lonely country road and sputter out and die.

  I emptied every last crystal into the tank, replaced the cap and mushed my way back to the raggedy lanyard hanging from my bedroom window. I had gotten good at the hand
over hand rope climb at spy school. Two long years ago. Of course I could put my feet out and walk myself up the side of the building, but where’s the sport in that?

  I rubbed feeling into my palms and started to climb, Jack Frost nipping at my posterior. I cheated by wrapping my legs around the bed sheets but I managed to haul my carcass up the lanyard and into the window.

  I lay there, beached on the window sill - front half in, back half out - and tried to catch my breath. My frozen back half felt warmer than my thawing front half. How did that make any sense? I squirmed inside and closed the window.

  I dried off in the bathroom, ran hot water over my hands and face, relocated and remade the bed, mummified myself in sheets and a blanket and shivered myself to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  D-day dawned bright and sunny. Melting ice carved channels in the frosty windowpane, the radiator clanked with heat and I stretched out, luxuriating in the warmth, anticipating a long hot shower in my private bath. Came a knock at the door.

  “Wake the fuck up.”

  Jimmy, who else? I got up and splashed water on my face, tapped a kidney and threw on some clothes. I reported to the dining room. Nine pair of eyeballs turned my way.

  “The prodigal son returns,” said The Schooler.

  I apologized for my tardiness and backed into a corner.

  “Let’s review again,” said The Schooler to grumbles and hooded stares at yours truly. I didn’t much care. Unbeknownst to themselves the seven punks had been written out of the script.

  But Jimmy was still key. I tried to make eye contact with him but he kept his head down. I leaned back against the wall and listened to The Schooler precisely detail a million dollar bank heist plan that would not take place.

  The day dragged on endlessly after that. I returned to my room and took a shower. I went to the kitchen and made myself breakfast - liverwurst and onion on pumpernickel, creamed herring on the side. I trailed after Jimmy like a dog, hoping to snag him for a one to one. No joy. He’d had a change of heart, or simply enjoyed torturing me.

  And what had Lizabeth been up to since I shot her down? Using her velvet hammer to beat dear old Henry into submission? If so it hadn’t worked. And Lizabeth wouldn’t be lowdown enough to turn to Jimmy.

  Would she?

  The day dragged on.

  And then, suddenly, it was H-hour. The plan called for The Schooler and me to motor off in the Packard. Jimmy and the boys would follow a few minutes later in the panel truck. We would take different routes. I had been prepped on what and what not to do and when and when not to do it. The only thing I was lacking as I shrugged into my vicuna topcoat in the foyer was the promised gat.

  Jimmy was standing ten feet away in the parlor, flanked by the troops. Kingdog the wolf was yipping and yapping, sensing the coiled tension in the room. The Schooler told us to synchronize our watches to 5:08 p.m. He repeated the time line.

  The Packard would be parked on E. 4th Street at Superior by 6:40. Jimmy would drive by on Superior by 6:50. The Schooler and I would then walk down the block to E. 6th and climb the front steps of the Federal Reserve Bank at precisely seven p.m. Jimmy would park the panel truck across from the side delivery gate on Rockwell fifteen minutes later.

  Lizabeth swept in just about then, dressed in a high-neck navy blue dress with white buttons down the front. The kind you might wear to a high school graduation. Or a funeral. She wished Henry good luck and embraced him tearfully. Then she turned around and took both my hands and lamped me with those sea green orbs. The room got quiet. My palms got moist.

  “I hope that we will meet again,” is what she said before she kissed me lightly on the cheek. She was gone before I found my tongue.

  Was this the Judas kiss? I unhinged my neck and looked at The Schooler. His face betrayed no more emotion than a wall clock. He inclined his head, time to go.

  I eyeballed Jimmy, I hiked my eyebrows. He smirked.

  My brain boiled with anger and frustration as I followed The Schooler out the door.

  Goddamn dumb cunning Jimmy Streets had turned the tables! I had wasted my time sabotaging the panel truck. Jimmy and the boys would not be coming. Jimmy and Lizabeth had conspired to send us off on a doomed mission so that Jimmy could take control of the Fulton Road Mob and Lizabeth could resume her life of leisure and…

  It was somewhere around there I felt it. The heavy clunk against my leg as we descended the front steps. I reached into the pocket of my topcoat to be sure. My fingers curled around a gun butt.

  The Schooler told me to get behind the wheel of the Packard. He climbed in on the passenger’s side and handed me the keys.

  Henry didn’t trust me. He didn’t pull a pearl-handled revolver or anything, just sat angled against the car door, his right hand in the pocket of his topcoat. He was a sharp guy, The Schooler. I fired up the land yacht and wheeled it down the driveway of the brown brick monastery.

  We headed west on Mayfield Road, the sunken sun firing red-orange flares on the horizon. We drove through farm country, acres of plowed fields, scalloped like the sea, snow settled in the furrows. A sign said, Chester Township, Geauga County.

  The plowed fields went away after we crossed County Line Road. Everything went away. The farm houses, the Sunoco stations, the feed stores, the roadside diners. I saw nothing but great stone posts bracketing long driveways and miles and miles of three-railed horse fences. We passed a discreet sign I had to squint to read.

  Welcome to Gates Mills, bird sanctuary.

  Rich old birds by the look of things. The Schooler told me to bear left on Old Mill Road. The terrain got hilly and thick with trees. I didn’t see an old mill anywhere but we did pass the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club, the hanging sign said as much. The hand-lettered plank below it was redundant.

  Private.

  We drove on. The Schooler had cooked up a clever getaway scheme. After we’d all boarded the panel truck the driver would wheel it three blocks to an alley off E. 2nd where he would roll up a ramp and into the back of a tarp-covered freight truck that would rumble off, destination unknown.

  I took Gates Mills Boulevard southwest to Shaker Boulevard west. Shaker then shaded north to Woodland which proceeded due west till it turned northwest until it became E. 4th which, with an occasional detour, headed due north to downtown.

  I needed to get there ahead of schedule so I put the Packard through its paces, passing on the right and crossing on the amber. The Schooler told me to take it easy. I slowed down some and fought my way west, checking my wristwatch every five minutes. If I ever met so much as a third generation descendant of the drunken madman who laid out the Cleveland street grid I would punch him square in the nose.

  I got us there. E. 4th and Superior, across the street from the Public Library, down the block from Higbee’s and Public Square. I hunted a parking place, and almost flattened a lady jaywalking with a jagged tower of Christmas packages.

  “Easy, easy,” said The Schooler.

  I found a spot and curbed the car. I checked my watch. 6:28 p.m. The panel truck was due by 6:50.

  We waited. We watched the bustling crowd of holiday shoppers, smiling and rosy-cheeked. The Schooler still had his right hand in his coat pocket. My preference was for that hand to be elsewhere. We waited some more.

  A squadrol flashed by on Superior, siren screaming. The Schooler jerked his hand from his pocket as he pressed forward against the dash. The time was now.

  “You said something about a gun.” No response, Mr. Big was preoccupied. Not a problem. I would soon have his undivided attention. “The gun?”

  The Schooler, craning his neck to follow the fading taillights of the squadrol, used his right hand to remove a .38 snub nose from the inside pocket of his topcoat. I knew what that meant. He wouldn’t be handing me a loaded weapon with his gun hand.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the .38 with my left hand and reaching into my pocket with my right. “But I prefer this one.”

  As dramatic r
evelations go this one was a real dud. The Schooler was so intent on the world outside the windshield that it took him a good five seconds to register what I’d said and acknowledge the .44 Special pointed at his gut. Then he deflated like a punctured tire and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Your loyal-as-a-butcher’s-dog first lieutenant gave it to me to rub you out.”

  The Schooler opened his eyes and looked at me. “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I don’t trust the son of a bitch.”

  “But you trust me?”

  “More than I trust Jimmy.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t have anything to prove.”

  The Schooler smiled, wanly. “What’s your plan?”

  “Same as yours, knock off the Federal Reserve. Only you’re the ticket in, not me.”

  “Jimmy and the others?”

  “They’re broken down somewhere in Chester Township.”

  “And you think two men can do this job?”

  “No. I’ve got three young loogans on ice. That’s plenty. These boys are smart, and not trigger-happy. Your getaway plan doesn’t change.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Same as the plant heist, 50-50.”

  “And if I refuse to co-operate?”

  I shrugged. “Then I’ve just nabbed Mr. Big and foiled the biggest bank job in Cleveland history.”

  I felt kind of bad for the old gent as I watched him nod his head in defeat, his masterpiece in tatters. It was a part of growing up I didn’t like. The realization that the elders you looked up to all had feet of clay.

  “How in the world did this happen?” said Henry Voss after a time.

  “Pride comes before the all,” I said. “You were showing off when you announced you knew I’d stashed my cut at National City Bank. You strutted your stuff before Jimmy, God and everyone but you got me to wondering how you knew where I kept my money. And why you’d care.”

  The Schooler muttered something but I wasn’t listening. I was watching the traffic on Superior. The time was 6:49. I kept the .44 trained on him till 6:53. The old sugar in the gas tank trick must have worked. The panel truck didn’t show.